Have you ever been on a long journey and you yearn for it to be over? As you get closer to your destination, you begin to anticipate getting there and finishing the trip. I have been that road-weary traveler and, especially when I am coming home, the last mile is a welcome site.

Why would that last mile look so much better to me than any other landscape outside my window on my trip? It is as simple as this: we are emotional creatures. We anticipate things will be better once we get to our destination. As we get closer, it is exciting to know we are almost there. The last mile – where things begin to look familiar to us – becomes a symbol of the good things in store for us when we arrive. We are, in a nutshell, anticipating happiness.

What does this have to do with marketing? Marketing is at its best when it can make an emotional connection with people enroute to happier times. If you can tie your brand to the emotional lift a person gets when their pain is being relieved or when they are driving towards pleasure, they will associate your brand with those good feelings.

So just what does your product or service do for people? Does it relieve their pain or does it bring them pleasure? This is easy to figure out if you are selling food. Dairy Queen ice cream treats bring people pleasure. It is also easy if you are selling pharmaceuticals. Tylenol relieves pain. You may think that your brand does neither. However, I would encourage you to take a closer look. One of the easiest ways to do so is to ask, "What would happen if what I was selling was in short supply or no longer existed?” Let’s say you are selling auto parts and you ran out of windshield wiper blades. When you look at it this way, you begin to see that the product clearly relieves the pain of your customers. They are reminded of it every time it rains and they cannot see where they are going.

Here is where your marketing needs to step in. I have already said that marketing works best when it is appealing to an emotion. If you can tie your brand to that can’t-wait-to-be-home feeling, you have accomplished a key part of this emotional quest for happiness. You need to market to that end. So if you were able to order ahead and have Dairy Queen deliver ice cream to your house the moment you got home, the brand is tied to your pleasure. Likewise, if your windshield wipers helped you get through a driving rain to get to your destination, market the brand to the relief from the pain of the long trip.

Market to your customers’ happiness. It is that last-mile-home feeling that you want them to think about when they recognize your brand.