A sale is never exclusively an emotional or an intellectual decision, it is a messy combination of both at a particular time in a particular circumstance.

We might think of the emotion and intellect as two ends of a scale, constantly fluctuating. The buyer usually doesn’t think too much about this scale during the buying process, but oftentimes once a sale has been made he or she will suddenly remember it when they are trying to justify the purchase to themselves (or potentially to someone else).

If at this point they see that one or the other side has had an outsized influence, they will work to retroactively balance the scale by either trying to gather more logical facts on the one hand, or to reinforce the abundance of facts that they already have with an emotional gut-check on the other hand.

Even if ​your personal method of communication​ favors either the side of emotional hype or that of intellectual nerdiness, it can be useful to have a healthy dose of each in your media because, chances are, if the customer is second guessing the decision to buy from you, it’s your content—not you directly—that they’re going to turn to when looking for extra weight to add on either side of the reassurance scale.

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P.S. I don’t think the scales have to be perfectly balanced (and since everyone’s value judgements are subjective, it is probably an impossible goal anyway). Mainly you want the customer to have at least something on each side of the scale that they are able to point to so that ultimately they can say: “Yeah, this purchase feels good and it makes sense.”

P.P.S. To read more about the symbiotic relationship of emotion and reason in our lives, check out Jonathan Haidt’s book ​The Happiness Hypothesis​ where he lays out his now well-known metaphor of the elephant and the rider.