in a nutshell, no, quality is not enough to sell the product because there are too many other production factors and user needs that need to be fulfilled to really sell the product.
i’ve worked on mostly housewares, electronics, personal care, kitchen appliances/gadgets. a factor often used to distinguish quality in these industries was consumer and prosumer level goods. the consumer level was run of the mill type, another branded skin job over some o.e.m. components for xy big box retailer. the prosumer goods (as in professional user) use much higher quality components and are designed to last longer and take more abuse than the consumer counterparts. the engineers would set up jigs for the protoypes to test cycle the usage and help determine the quality of the internal components, the designers would do drop testing and so on.
aside of the safety requirements of planned obsolescence (designing a product to fail after a specified amount of usage), it has always baffled me why products can/should not be designed for quality usage far beyond a lifetime. i mean with today’s materials science, nano-mechanisms and so on, i want some products to last several generations and still be usable ! my old roommate who had a japanese cooking knife that has been in her family for 6 generations, handed down each time, it had her family name etched near the bolster - i want more products to have this kind of quality and meaning. i know it’s not applicable to all products but i think it is now critical that we design a significant number of products that embody components and technologies that stand the test of time, generations of time. and not just for the sake of it.
i guess my aspiration for quality is close to what phaedrus defined it in ‘zen and the art of motorcycle maintenance’:
‘it is the event at which both the classic (scientific, intellectual) and romantic (emotional) awareness of an object is possible.’