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THE RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN LOW QUALITY PRODUCT AND CONSUMER CHOICE
The study is aimed to find out the influencing factors when consumers decide to choose products with low quality. The result indicates that major considered factors should be short life cycle, low quality, design, price and purchase intention, while price be considered as the one which has significant effect on consumers’ choices of accepting low quality, as well as product design. Most companies put the market share at the vital position, in traditional commercial thinking, high quality always means that products will be accepted by most customers; but now it is totally different. We take fast fashion industry and mobile phone industry as examples and choose fsQCA as the methodology to analyses the relationship between variable and result.
Most of the customers are pursuing for high quality with low price (Dodds et al., 1991; Alfred, 2013; Shirai, 2015). But the companies are difficult to make the high quality products have low price. The companies can have the high quality advantage. However, quality is not the only factor to make the products with high price, design, corporate culture and brand can also be the factors (Homburg et al., 2015). How to make the consumers accept the low quality in short lifecycle product (e.g. fast fashion or high-tech industry), which means consumers may purchase new product to replace the old one before it has problems.
In our study, we collect these data from customers via questionnaire. And use fsQCA to analyze the relationship between price, design and short lifecycle, all these influencing factors and customer purchase intention on low quality product. And we have some findings. Sometimes, low quality products can help companies achieve success by bringing income and satisfy consumers’ needs of goods and services in affordable price. From company’s aspect, low quality products are more affordable than those of high quality, so these products will win larger market share and promote fast fashion items to sell fast. While customers sometimes demand more products with good design, at the same time, they cannot bear the expensive items, low quality products can achieve balanced between demands and consuming ability. This means both companies and customers can get win-win situation.
