If you search the internet for the word Quality you will find about one billion or more results; 449,970,277 at MSN, 709,000,000 at Yahoo and 1,830,000,000 at Google. The supply of quality is guaranteed, you might say. But now the demand for quality.

Overture provides for the month march 2006 328,191 searches for quality. The highest number is 69,240 (Quality Inn) and followed by Quality itself (35,245).

If you would translate these figures you might come up with the idea that the demand for quality is highly overrated. Luxury on the other hand is relatively much more wanted; it receives 137,000,000 responses (Google) and 1,342,000 searches (Overture). This gives a ratio of about hundred (102) whereas the previous ratio the number of quality supplied divided by the number searched for is about 5,484.

Altogether, this seems more than strange. For quality you would imagine that when people talk and write about it (including this article producer) it should also be important. Reality shows however, that people hardly search for it.

The other thing which is interesting is the fact about luxury which is relatively much more demanded through the internet. This is interesting because of the character of luxury goods, they should be somehow scarce, exclusive and hard to find. These are characteristics that do not really match the character of the internet, which is open, abundant and ubiquitous.

So, if you are using quality as a keyword you can do without, and if you are using luxury as a keyword you might consider increasing the price of your product.

2006 Hans Bool