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

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.

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

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

Curiosity is the catalyst for creativity. It’s what allows you to see opportunities and harness the inspiration to seize them. Finding inspiration can be difficult, despite how infinite it is. So rather than waiting for it to find you, create a plan that allows it to flow naturally through you and into your work. So, bring the outside world into yo

Platon

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

Viewed in this way, the poster does far more than showcase another great athlete; it distills the very purpose of Nike—the core of its brand—into an image: You too are an athlete capable of greatness.

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

Throughout this book, we’re going to be talking a lot about the process by which we do this: How do we tell the most effective story to connect with our consumers? Where do we start? What are we looking for? But before we get to those stories, we first need to lay the foundation.