Impact Of Perceived Service Quality On Customer Satisfaction And Brand Loyalty
[A CASE STUDY OF HONEYWELL FLOUR MILLS PLC]

People can form different perceptions of the same stimulus because of three perceptual processes: selective attention, selective distortion, and selective retention. People are exposed to a great amount of stimuli every day. For example people are exposed to 2000 to 5000 ad messages every day. It is impossible for a person to pay attention to all these stimuli. Selective attention¬the tendency for people to screen out most of the information to which they are exposed- means that marketers must work especially hard to attract the consumer's attention.
Even noticed stimuli do not always come across in the intended way. Each person fits incoming information into an existing mind-set. Selective distortion describes the tendency of people to interpret information in a way that will support what they already believe. For example if you distrust a company, you might perceive even honest ads from the company as questionable. Selective distortion means that marketers must try to understand the mind-sets of consumers and how these will affect interpretations of advertising and sales information.
People also will forget much of what they learn. They tend to retain information that support their attitudes and beliefs. Because of selective retention, consumers are likely to remember good points made about a brand they favour and to forget good points made about competing brands. Because of selective exposure, distortion, and retention, marketers must work hard to get their messages through. This explains why marketers use so much drama and repetition in sending messages to their market.
Consumer behaviours are influenced by their perception of whether the services or products offered by organisations will fulfill their expectations or will not. It a consumer perceives the performance and characteristics/features of a product or service as matching his/her needs, he/she will be motivated to purchase the item.
Today's customers are faced with a wide range of choices in the products or services they can buy. They base their choices on their perception of quality, value and service. Tallent (1998) said that two people with the same motivation and in the same situation perceive differently. Individual perception is influenced by the nature of past experience, by the person's physiological abilities (sight, smell, touch, taste, audio and memory) and also by the individual's psychological characteristics (personality and need-value systems).
Marketing of products or services is not complete until the consumer perceives the service. The relationship between the consumers' expectation and the perceived performance determines further behaviour of the consumer. If the perceived performance meets expectations, the consumer will be satisfied; if it exceeds expectation, the consumer will be more than satisfied i.e. delighted but if it falls short of expectation; the consumer will be disappointed and may defect if not assuaged.
Marketers of service must recognize that consumer are exposed to numerous competing stimuli and so to receive their attention, the marketer needs to be very creative, do something unique and of interest capture the consumer's attention.
2.4     Product Quality and Importance
Kotler (2002) defined product quality as the rated ability of the brand to perform its functions. Quality has been identified as one of the major positioning tools of the marketer. Manufacturers do not attempt to build the highest quality product because higher quality products will cost more. Marketers are therefore faced with two decisions
(a)     Where to locate brand's initial quality and
(b)     How to manage the brand's quality level through time.
Based on studies carried out on the above decisions, investigations found out that companies should aim to deliver above average quality. Superior quality increases profitability only slightly while inferior quality hurt profitability substantially. Firms can manage the brand's quality level by improving the quality, maintaining the quality and by reducing the quality depending on options applicable. These various options show the importance of the product.
Product importance is used to signify importance as perceived by consumers rather than some objective level of importance strictly inherent within the product itself. One of the earliest and the most widely accepted tenets of consumer behavior theory is that consumers as a group considers different products to be differentially important.
Houston & Rothschild (1998) & Tyebjee (1999) have suggested that for any particular product perception of importance vary across consumers.