L'approche Qualité Perçue [The Perceived Quality Approach]

In a fiercely competitive context where customers are confronted with a huge variety of products and services, not only must companies offer quality products, but this quality must also ""jump out"" at customers, who must immediately recognize that the offering responds to their needs. But what determines how a customer perceives a product? Using what methods can this phenomenon be analyzed? How to improve the perceived quality of the offering concretely? How should the company be organized and how should processes be adapted to achieve this goal? This very complete book – whose voluminous text sometimes makes for slow reading–attempts to answer these questions.
Given that the author held positions of great responsibility at Renault for many years, the book borrows many examples from this automaker, and from the automotive industry in general. However, other sectors are frequently cited as well, such as home appliances and the hotel industry.
The mental mechanisms that influence the perception of a product are described in great detail in chapters 2 and 3. They are very usefully complemented by chapters 4 and 6, devoted to methods for analyzing the feelings of customers and which explain techniques such as customer benchmarking and real-life product testing. Ways to use the results of these analyses to design products that generate a more positive impression are covered in chapter 5, a key part of the book that readers in a hurry should consult first. The last part of the book (chapters 7 to 9) is devoted to the organizational issues faced by companies that want to make perceived quality a top priority, e.g. project planning processes, design team coordination, the need to integrate the results of customer tests at every stage of the process, etc.