Photo Disclaimer: This photo is unedited, unfiltered, and quite literally a picture of a picture—but hopefully, you get the picture. Not going for perfection here, going for feeling. 😉

In the early 2000s, kids in the U.S. were trading Pokémon cards by day and racing home to play their Game Boy Advance at night. We were moving toward digital, but not fully there yet. (Texting on my red Nokia phone was T9, and minutes cost money.)

Meanwhile, one of the world’s most trusted brands—LEGO—was running out of money.

The company was chasing every new trend, adding products left and right, while slowly losing sight of what made it meaningful to kids who loved to play.

“Designers know best” was their mindset. “We don’t accept unsolicited ideas” was their mantra.

Teams were siloed. LEGO designers were so sure they knew what kids wanted they stopped listening. Even in the rare moments they interacted with kids, they dismissed what they saw and heard. Decisions were made far from living room floors where LEGO mattered.

“We were walled off from the fan community,” recalled a former community relations specialist.

By the end of 2003, LEGO was $800 million in debt, and expecting it to get worse. Negative cash flow of more than $160 million has a way of removing any feeling that things are “fine.”

The book Brick by Brick recounts the series of events that eventually turned things around. But at the center of that turnaround wasn’t a hard LEGO brick you could hold in your hand.

It was something much softer …

empathy for kids.

Like most meaningful change, the fix didn’t happen overnight. LEGO didn’t flip a switch and become “customer centered.” They had to develop a new way of looking at things. A new mindset. Only then did they embrace empathetic interactions with kids, and logic built on human connection.

They adopted an inside-out approach where kids got involved at every stage of the process. No product idea could move forward without a big thumbs-up from them. And instead of asking kids what they wanted, LEGO would show them ideas … then listen, watch, and try to understand what kids were feeling.

If kids got bored, LEGO moved on. If a set sparked imagination and kids lit up with elaborate stories, they knew they were onto something.

That new mindset, followed by an empathetic approach, did something beautifully simple … it helped LEGO launch sets that kids loved and made the company money.

One of the first teams to embrace the approach, the 2005 City construction and police set team, more than tripled the line’s revenue to $60 million. As it gained momentum, revenues doubled and doubled again, reaching $275 million in 2007.

Other teams followed. The DUPLO team used the same approach to revamp a failing a train set. The original version was full of electronics, never tested with kids, and cost LEGO 13 percent of its train business in core markets.

During kid testing of the new version, the team had a face-palm realization … the gears designed to make the train go backwards were useless.

When preschoolers wanted the train to go backwards, they just picked it up and turned it around.

So LEGO removed the gears. Production costs were cut in half.

“That’s the logic of a three-year-old,” said the designer.

They had to unlearn what they thought they knew.

The kids knew best.

As a marketer, you know the product. But your customer is the expert on their emotion, and behavioral science proves that people make decisions based on emotion first and then justify those decisions with logic. Your job as a marketer is to make sure you have both, and that you put them in the right order.

LEGO had everything they needed to build a profitable DUPLO train set. They had the product, features, tools, and the team. But until they put empathy for kids first, the product was losing money.

The emotional miss mattered more than the logic of product specs.

After they embraced the insight kids brought to light, the revamped train set sold so well it became a core DUPLO product for more than seven years.

And that’s the part we easily forget in marketing … people are the point.

Empathy isn’t a “soft” personality trait or a nice-to-have. It’s a strategic business driver that can boost your bottom line.

When we don’t have empathy, it’s disguised as “a messaging problem” or “an awareness problem.” Maybe even “a conversion problem.”

So we do what smart marketers do under pressure, we use logic.

But putting logic first doesn’t drive the most meaningful results. Logic needs empathy for direction. Backwards gears on a train set were logical, but they didn’t resonate with the customer. They worked, but they overcomplicated things unnecessarily.

Empathy is what tells logic where to aim so you can focus on what matters.

Rethinking their mindset, building empathy for kids, and then applying logic to what they learned (not what they assumed) led LEGO to results that were good for people and good for growth.

When they got closer to kids, the work got clearer, more intentional, and more profitable. Why? Because LEGO changed how they observed, interpreted what they saw, and how willing they were to question their own assumptions.

That kind of empathy requires more than good intentions. It requires emotional intelligence.

Because you can’t understand others if you don’t understand yourself. Your mindset shapes your emotions and your emotions don’t stay hidden. They shape the questions you ask, the things you notice, and the conclusions you come to.

Building empathy for others starts with self-awareness.

Carrie Rule, emotional intelligence expert, defines emotional intelligence as recognizing, understanding, and managing your emotions while also tuning into and influencing the emotions of others.

She advises that empathy is often misunderstood as a “soft” trait—something you either have or you don’t. She argues that’s not true. Even if empathy doesn’t come naturally to you, you can still build it by practicing it, just like any other skill. And just like LEGO had to build it before they built anything else.

Carrie believes when we invest in self-awareness and connecting with others, there’s no problem we can’t solve. I think she’s right.

Emotional intelligence matters because it helps us recognize what’s really driving behavior. When you understand your emotions better, you’re better at understanding others. And that’s what makes you a better marketer.

In fact, research shows that about 90 percent of the best performers at work have high emotional intelligence. That means marketers who can understand and manage emotions—including empathy—can be significantly more effective.

Here are a few that follow the The MEL Method.

Mindset checked

What am I feeling right now, and where did it come from?

For LEGO, it was a shift from “designers know best” to “kids know best.”

Empathy activated

What might someone else be experiencing that I’m not seeing?

To understand kids, LEGO teams sat down with them and observed how they felt and reacted. Kids showed them what they didn’t see.

Logic aimed at what matters

How could I interpret this situation differently?

For LEGO, kids didn’t have to be product designers. They didn’t ask kids what to change about the DUPLO train. They simply observed how kids already played, and that led to new insights.

Ironically, the brick-solid foundation of LEGO didn’t end up being the LEGO brick.

It ended up being the human-to-human connections with kids. Those interactions showed LEGO how kids found meaning in play. And they continue to drive differentiation and results … even in today’s age of all things digital.

As painful as it was, LEGO had to admit that they didn’t know what kids wanted, because empathy for others starts with honesty about ourselves.

What You’ll Need:

We were all kids once.

Maybe that’s why building a LEGO set with my nephews is still one of my favorite activities. It’s hands-on, intentional, and human. And it reminds me that creating doesn’t always need to be about speed or being on a screen.

Most marketing work is open-ended (there’s always another tab, tweak, or campaign).

Building with LEGOs has a beginning, middle, and end. And that sense of completion is becoming rare in marketing.

So go build a LEGO set.

Your choice on what to build and who to build it for.

If this story sparked a thought, a question, or even a gentle disagreement, I’d love to hear it. Tell me what resonated—or what didn’t.

I’d love to make this a conversation so we can learn and grow together.