YP
Brian,
I think the hardest thing for men to understand is that we are not our market. We like to think of ourselves as logical, left brained thinking guys, which we are. Women tend to be better balanced between the 2 hemispheres and tend to look at the big picture taking in all details with all of their senses.
This doesn't mean that women are all emotional and men are Spock devotees. The simplest way to look at it is that the right brain is the picture while the left brain is the thousand words. We know that most of our customers will not read the thousand words but they will look at the picture.
The limbic system is the part of our brain that controls emotions and decides whether or not any information gets distributed to the rest of the brain.
You may have heard the saying "we buy on emotion and we justify with logic"
If marketing is to be effective it must be emotional. For people to take action, they have to care. In other words a picture of your truck does not make people care. Feelings inspire people to act.
We make people care by appealing to things that matter to them. We create empathy for specific individuals or ideas.
This is why a picture of your child, grandchild, puppy stops the woman who is looking through the Yellow Pages. Once you have her attention now you have to close the deal through good copy , a guarantee and testimonials with an offer that says why she should do it now.
Emotions get you the job and your cleaning skills and people skills justify the logic of why you.
So this was a long way of saying that yes you need a warm fuzzy.
