How does your customer feel?

Marketing Guru Seth Godin has this insightful post on the difference between what your product does, and how it makes your customer feel.

He point out:

Did you do an analysis of the outcomes of his treatments along a wide range of patients and compare those outcomes to similar doctors in the same community?

Or was it based on his bedside manner or even how polite his receptionist was?

And what about the accounting firm or law firm or personal trainer you were talking about the other day?

Is it possible that people recommend a Mac so often because of things that having nothing to do with a side-by-side analysis of the speed of data entry in Word?

Given two or more choices between competing products which are all roughly equally competent, word-of-mouth will favor the product which makes the customer feel better.

Then comes the kicker:

How’s this for a 98% rule: By a factor of three, what you do is not nearly as important as how it makes people feel.

If you buy that, then the question is this: why do you spend almost all your time on the wrong thing?

Annual H-1B visa cap met in one day

CNET News is reporting this:

U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services said Tuesday that it had received 150,000 applications as of Monday afternoon for the controversial work permits, which allow foreigners with a bachelor’s degree in their area of specialty to be employed in the United States for up to six years.

That’s more than enough applications to meet the cap for the visas, which currently stands at 65,000.

This used to take many months in previous years.  Last year it took two months.  And I’ve heard that the cap does not apply to Indians and Chinese, but I am not sure of the accuracy of that information. But in any case, this is an interesting development.