Mila is celebrating after its latest round of independent market research showed that product quality is now the single most important factor for fabricators when choosing a hardware supplier.
The company, which claims to maintain an ‘unwavering commitment to product quality throughout its range’, says the results of the research ‘vindicate its uncompromising approach’.
In unprompted questioning amongst a broad mix of fabricators and not just Mila customers, product quality ranked much higher than price and way ahead of the next most common responses, which included customer service, delivery time, stock availability and reliability.
What was also significant in the findings was that poor product quality was the most common reason given by fabricators for not choosing a supplier, outweighing bad customer service, unreliable deliveries and even price.
Mila managing director, Richard Gyde, said: “These findings have been particularly pleasing for Mila since we have always focused on the quality and performance of our products and have firmly believed that the market appreciates value rather than just price. When we carried out the same research in 2011, price was the most important factor, so it seems that perceptions are really starting to change which is good news not just for Mila but for the market as a whole.”
Mila’s market research, which was carried out at the start of 2014, was ‘double blind’ which means that neither the interviewer nor the person being interviewed knew who the research was being carried out for. This ensured that it was totally independent and not biased either by perceptions about Mila or by the fact that the interviewee might be one of Mila’s customers.
The research was truly comprehensive with fabricators also being asked about what they considered to be the most important attributes of any hardware supplier and also which suppliers in the market they felt best exemplified these.
Here again, Mila scored highly, with 67% of respondents naming Mila as the number one, almost four times the number who named the supplier in second place.
