Delivering Two Kinds of Quality [the broken link was removed] by Keith McFarland, Business Week:
Japanese manufacturers were so obsessed with taken-for-granted quality that they created a constant stream of innovations that built on renowned quality-management consultant Ed Deming’s original concepts: lean manufacturing, just-in-time industry, and design for quality. In today’s competitive markets, manufacturers need to be very far along this quality innovation curve — or moving along it very quickly.
Related ideas:
Kano model of Customer Satisfaction: Kano saw three types of customer satisfaction: required (basic quality also threshold requirements), more is better (performance quality) and delighter (excitement quality).
Customers expectations change over time. Often what was once enough to delight a customer (remote control for a TV) becomes expected. Once a feature is expected the organization gets no credit for providing it they only risk a negative reaction if they fail to provide it.