“Experience is not what happens to a man; it is what a man does with what happens to him. ”
   
Aldous Huxley

SKI, Swedish Quality Index, measures quality trough surveys in a number of industries every year. The quality Index is composed of several component, among which Expectations (together with Loyalty) stand out for most brands in most categories as being the strongest explanation of Quality

The question is which came first? Do people rationalize their experiences so that they experience the quality they expected? Or are expectations based on experiences of quality – own or others?

A classic example is an experiment where students where given information about a lecturer in a coming class. Some student where told he was exceptionally good, some that he was average and some that he was rather lousy. All participants then visited the same lecture, and those with high expectations also the rated the lecturer’s performance the highest, whereas those who were told he was bad, also rated the lecturer low. So expectations do influence the experience.

When our expectations are confronted with the actual product or service, the flaws we didn’t think of becomes evident, and the quality experience was not as good as we expected. But that’s all right, because we have already started to consume one with higher quality – the next one.