What is quality?
Quality, just like beauty, is in the eye of the beholder. Quality is a subjective phenomenon. It is an emotional experience that ensues as a result of perception and expectations. A feeling of high quality appears when perception exceeds expectations; while a feeling of low quality ensues when perception does not fulfil expectations.
When perception corresponds to expectations a feeling of satisfaction prevails which represents a neutral quality. The most common element of the business definition of quality is that the quality of a product or service refers to the perception of the degree to which the product or service fulfils the consumer's expectation.
Therefore quality does not have a specific meaning unless it is connected to an exact specific function or specific facility. Thus quality is always perceptive, conditional, and to a great extent a subjective attribute. Quality in business operations, manufacturing and engineering has a pragmatic interpretation as the non-inferiority or superiority of something.
Given that quality is perceptive, conditional and in a way subjective, so too can it be differently understood by different people. Consumers most often talk about the specificities of the quality of a product or service when they compare these products and services with the competition in the market.
Manufacturers, on the other hand, as a rule also define the measures of quality as a degree of compliance with a certain standard that stipulates how a particular product must be manufactured to be correct.
Philosophy, but also rational thought, view quality as a relation of either subjective feeling or objective facts.
