QUALITY DIMENSION IN THE CONTEXT OF CONSUMERS

Quality is a significant parameter for goods and services. Quality is hard to explain, yet people do recognize it and are ready to pay more for better quality services and products. Everybody understands the term quality in some other manner. Traditionally, quality means an intangible concept of beauty and excellence. D. Garvins quality characteristics (dimensions) for goods and services provide useful arsenal of tools to be used by the author in the present research. D. Garvins quality characteristics for goods include performance, features, reliability, conformance, durability, serviceability, aesthetics and perceived quality. Quality characteristics of services, in their turn, include tangibles, service reliability, responsiveness, assurance, empathy, availability, professionalism, timeliness, completeness and pleasantness. The research will show what kind of quality characteristics produce an impact to the choice of services/ goods made by Latvian consumers. The aim of this paper is to examine a perceptions the dimensions of quality and customers perceptions of quality in the products and services what they purchase in order to provide a framework for a better understanding of the various dimensions of product and service quality and their impact on consumer perceptions. The methods applied in research are referential analysis of literature and survey of inhabitants (questionnaire). The tasks of the research: to provide explication of quality characteristics, to carry out a questionnaire of the inhabitants of Latvia aimed to find out, what quality dimensions determine the consumers perception of quality, to come to conclusions on how quality is perceived.