Designing Emotion: How Nike Masters the Experience Economy
The first thing you notice when you open Nike’s website isn’t the shoes — but the feeling. The screen is filled with strong images of individuals posing and in motion: faces focused, bodies stretched, athletes celebrating. The background is mostly black and white, which makes the photos’ energy stand out. You can almost hear the sound of sneakers hitting the pavement. That is designing with emotion.
Today, we live in what researchers call the “experience economy”, a term first introduced by B. Joseph Pine II and James H. Gilmore in 1998. Instead of just selling a product or service, commercial companies are selling memorable experiences for customers to engage with in a personal way.” In short, people are buying moments that make them feel something.
Nike is one brand that has mastered this idea.
More Than a Product, It’s a Feeling
In Design Is Storytelling, Ellen Lupton writes, “A great story does more than represent emotion from a distance. It makes us feel an emotional charge.” Nike’s story is about motion, determination, and self-belief. The brand uses visual design to connect those emotions to its audience.
Nike’s minimal color palette of black, white, and gray keeps attention on bold, expressive photography. Each image, whether it shows a runner pushing through rain or a basketball player jumping mid-air, tells a story of energy, effort, and success. These visuals evoke anticipation, joy, and trust, all part of Robert Plutchik’s Wheel of Emotions.
Designers must also rely on empathy strategies and emotional intelligence to understand what motivates their audience. Exploring emotional context allows brands to elicit deeper feelings than just happiness or surprise.
Lupton explains that designing for emotion is about “how users will anticipate an experience and how they will remember it later.” Nike does both. The brand builds excitement before purchase through powerful visuals and motivational copy, and leaves lasting memories through consistent design and shared customer experiences. When people wear Nike or scroll through social media, they feel part of something larger than a product line.
Emotion as Experience
Nike mood board based on website
Nike’s emotional storytelling goes beyond traditional advertising. Its slogan, “Just Do It,” has become a global catchphrase. As Beyond the Swoosh: How Nike Crafted a Legacy of Emotional Connection explains, the slogan is a message “to break barriers, challenge the status quo, and assert one’s potential.”
The emotional connection grows through Nike’s online community and culture. Fans of the brand share their collections, workouts, and style on social media, turning Nike products into symbols of identity. Sneaker culture plays a major role, too. Limited releases and collaborations have turned simple shoes into objects of passion and status. Each new drop creates excitement and connection, showing how design can fuel both emotion and community.
Nike's emotional power also comes from how it turns design into living experiences. The Nike Run Club app, product customization tools, and global events make the brand interactive and personal. This follows Pine and Gilmore’s model of moving from commodity to product to service to experience. Nike doesn’t just sell sportswear — it sells energy, belonging, and motivation. Lupton describes this shift as the move “from objects to actions,” and Nike has embraced it.
The Takeaway
Nike shows that design today is about creating emotion and meaning. Details like typography and photography add real value to Nike products, transforming them into experiences people can feel and remember. In the experience economy, design is a powerful tool to convert a product into a lifestyle. Nike’s design shows performance and makes people feel capable of achieving it.
“When a person buys a service, he purchases a set of intangible activities carried out on his behalf. But when he buys an experience, he pays to spend time enjoying a series of memorable events that a company stages—as in a theatrical play—to engage him in an inherently personal way.” (B. Joseph Pine II and James H. Gilmore, The Experience Economy)
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