Introduction

Citation

Briggs, A. (2003), "Introduction", Measuring Business Excellence, Vol. 7 No. 4. https://doi.org/10.1108/mbe.2003.26707dab.001

Introduction

Introduction

Amanda Briggs September 2003

Marketing and quality – different worlds, or twin stars

I was once at a conference where there was much discussion about how business leaders must learn to understand the language of quality, and how terrible it all was that they did not. It was a panel discussion session, and speaker after speaker chimed in with a horror story of how top management did not really take much notice of him/her, and was it not terrible that they did not, and would not it be great if there were more top managers in the room to hear all these messages about how important quality management really is in the organization (applause).

All very well. Then a softly-spoken Scandinavian man, neatly attired in a sports jacket and tie, chimed in, in the rather diffident and polite manner that many North Europeans have, to the effect that he was very sorry and maybe it was his lack of command of the English language (he spoke it impeccably) but surely the point was that quality managers should learn the language of business, and not the other way round. He was far too nice to say so, but the unspoken message was that, as a Swede at an American conference, it was unrealistic to expect the whole room to have learned Swedish just so they could communicate with him.

In short, the prevailing language of business is business language; customers, markets, bottom line, shareholders, productivity, return on assets, return on capital and so on; and not quality language.

It is with this in mind that we open this issue of Quality Focus not with a quality management theme, but with a marketing and advertising one. Joao Viana and colleagues from J. Walter Thompson in Portugal give their picture of "Communication warriors", from the point of view of one of the largest and most sophisticated communications agencies in the world. Why "warriors"? Because communications is a battle for what advertizers call "share of mind". Communication is not just about messages being sent; it happens when messages are also received and processed.

I have always been very fond of reading about theoretical physics – the great and the small of our universe; the universal and the atomic. So when I started thinking about this, it struck me that managing quality and managing marketing, particularly marketing communications, come from different worlds – different philosophies, different languages, different perspectives, different ways of thinking, both existing in parallel with each other, both (for the most part) largely unaware of the existence of the other.

But that was not quite right, I thought. So the next astro-physical analogy which came to mind was that of twin stars. Each is whole in itself, but they are held by each other's gravity. Indeed, their existence is symbiotic. Take one away, and the other may well spin wildly out of its position.

It is time quality management and communications management discovered each other's existence. Quality makes branding possible. Without quality management there is no possibility of reliability and replicability; the disciplines which enable brands to exist. Without effective communications, quality management will not gain share of mind in an organization's competition for scarce resources. And ultimately, of course, despite Ralph Waldo Emerson's oft-quoted maxim, simply building a better mousetrap will not lead the world to build a path to your door. Success is about more than quality – it is about communication of quality. It is about recognizing that there are other stars and other worlds, and that in the end, they make up a universe together.