I’ve just finished reading a book that I can heartily recommend to anybody with any interest in the world and the meaning of life. It’s called Zen And The Art Of Motorcycle Maintenance, by Robert M. Pirsig (not a French Fancy to be seen).
It’s basically a story of a man trying to find a solution to the eternal “mind versus matter” struggle - objectivity versus subjectivity. The finer details are far too mindboggling to go into in any great detail here, but the whole principle rests around Quality. What is quality? How do we recognise it? I score myself as a 9 on You Gov’s brand index scale of how brand aware a person is, and would like to think that I can recognise quality - or Quality - being Good and worthy of the capital letters.
The lead character in the book believes that Quality is not something that exists within objects, but neither is it something that is subjective, as often numerous individuals recognise the notion of quality around the same things. Therefore it exists independently of us and guides us to make the decisions we do and have the feelings we have.
A good example of this in marketing terms is the fact that despite the economic downturn “the top 100 global brands have increased in value by 2% over the past year”, according to The Executive Marketing Blog.
One of the featured brands is Apple and - being an Apple convert myself and with all the negative press around Windows Vista in particular and Microsoft in general – any Apple user will tell you that there is something about Apple that screams Quality. They seem to have thought of every detail from an end-user perspective. That’s where the Quality comes in: no separation of object-subject, producer-consumer. An organisation can strive for Quality, but it must realise the value of Quality during the process. Like Pirsig’s lead realises, the only Zen you find at the top of a mountain is the Zen that you take up there with you.
P.S. If you can sit all the way through this ad please post and let me know.