Defining perceived quality in the automotive industry: an engineering approach.

Perceived quality is the one of most important factors underlying success of car manufacturers today. There is a sufficient body of literature regarding the perceived quality from a marketing research perspective, applied psychology and consumer research. As the engineering viewpoint, perceived quality represented in the literature mainly by the work that has purpose to assess different aspects of perceived quality in order to evaluate them in the early design stages. At that point there is no theoretical framework built up yet, that combine customer view on perceived quality and the engineering prospects of this broad term. As the consequence, terms regarding perceived quality components and elements often have multiply meanings or meanings similar to each other. There is a need to standardize the terminology and definitions related to perceived quality more concretely. This paper makes the basis of the theoretical framework in an attempt to build a model, including different aspects of perceived quality regarding automotive industry needs. Based on the literature review and industry examples, the authors propose a common terminology and perceived quality definition in the field of the automotive industry