Emotion By Design: Creative Leadership Lessons from a Life at Nike

Discarded concepts often help focus your efforts, if only to discover what doesn’t work.

The trick was to communicate these things not as an engineer would (no offense to engineers), but as your friend who just got this new gadget would.

What Google and Apple did very well with their own product launches was focus on the amazing things that the innovation enabled the consumer to do, not on the specific technical features. When we set out to communicate the benefits of the new Apple Watch Nike+, we needed to resist the temptation to focus on all the exciting things that the watch co

But perhaps product design’s biggest source of inspiration is Nature itself, through the practice of biomimicry, which is the art of drawing inspiration from nature and applying it to design solutions for people. Sometimes this calls for taking design cues found in plants, animals, even insects. Other times it’s drawing directly from the human body

When I speak about brand identity to my audiences, I often use the metaphor of a picture frame. Your brand identity is how you frame every image, every product, every bit of output from your brand. The frame shouldn’t overshadow the picture—or the thing you’re trying to showcase—but it should contain recognizable elements that would tell anyone thi

Put simply, a brand gains a competitive advantage through its ability to construct powerful emotional bonds with its consumers. I believe this connection can be consistently achieved by cultivating a strong creative culture. I call this Emotion by Design—the ability to create stories, images, and experiences that make people feel that even their mo

by helping one person, it can help many people. But don’t stop there. Don’t leave it to the individual customer to be converted as a believer in your product; help them convert others. Be active and purposeful in building a cause around the product.

“No bird soars too high if he soars with his own wings.” —William Blake

When Jeff translated that to the brand and business world, it meant if you want to be an innovator, you need to defy the conventional tactics, and take the lead from the start and let the competition react.