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?