The power of putting story into what you make and sell

- In 1942, the mayor of New York, Mayor LaGuardia did a city-wide sting where he rated thousands and thousands of gambling halls, gathered up their equipment and then ceremoniously smashed them with a sledgehammer. The equipment that he gathered up were pinball machines and in fact, this was part of the great pinball machine ban of the 1940s that happened across the country. Now why did Mayor LaGuardia and why did all of the mayors and all of the cities around the country hate pinball? Why did it go away for decades? Well, it's actually because of the story that went around about what pinball represented. It turns out that pinball is this game, it's a fun game that you play trying to knock the ball around until it falls into the hole and you lose but the story went that pinball owners were hustling children for their lunch money, that kids who couldn't afford lunch were losing their money to afford lunch by playing these awful games. It became associated with gambling and sort of seediness and so they banned them everywhere. This story ruined the pinball industry at least for a few decades. Now, before I get back to what happened with pinball I want to tell another story about a machine that GE invented, a new MRI machine for doing brain scans and body scans. They spent millions and millions of dollars on redesigning this great piece of equipment that saves lives. Now, the man who designed the machine who oversaw the project was so excited when they finally started installing these new MRI machines in hospitals until one day he went to check out how the new machine was going and he saw a little girl in the hallway about to get her MRI. She was a little girl crying, telling her mom, no, please don't make me go in the machine again and he was so sad, so distraught, that he went home and he couldn't stop thinking about it. That it turns out that MRI machines are super scary. They're noisy, they're loud, you have to hold still for half an hour while things happen above you and it for a kid this is a terrifying experience. It's not comfortable for an adult, for kid it's awful. And so GE was faced with this trouble of having to either allow these very vulnerable patients to suffer during this process, maybe even refuse to go into the machine or redesign this machine, spend millions and millions more dollars redesigning the machine. But they came up with something that changed everything through story. What they did is they said, well let's paint the MRI machine, like a pirate ship and let's give kids who are about to take an MRI the night before a storybook, that they can read with their families, where they can learn about the story of the pirate adventure that they're going to go on the next day. And they meet characters like Marcella, the monkey and they learn about this story and they become part of the story. So then when they come to the hospital the nurses and doctors are dressed in their pirate outfits and you go on this journey that eventually ends up with you laying on the MRI machine and then you have to hold still and be quiet while you go past the pirate ship. What happened when they started doing this is kids went from crying, refusing to go into the MRI machine to saying, can I go again? Which is awesome and this is the power of story. So in pinballs case story ruined the machine, in GE's case story made the machine and it made the product better. And it did so for much, much cheaper than it would have taken to redesign the whole product. Now, people, when they're picking who to do business with or products to buy, they'll pick either what's easier, cheap, or the pick what they feel like is high quality or some combination of those or they'll pick what they like. Sometimes we'll override our rationality because of the story of the product itself. So a great story interwoven into a product will make us pick the thing that maybe is less comfortable. An MRI machine is not comfortable for a kid but they will pick it and they'll actually enjoy it if there's a great story attached to it. Which brings us back to pinball. For decades, pinball was banned. It was seen as this awful seedy thing, but it came back in a huge way, selling millions of machines making millions of dollars in the 1970s because of movies. Specifically because of summer blockbuster movies when Jaws and E.T and Indiana Jones came out the pinball makers wove those stories into the pinball machines. Suddenly you had a lot of reasons to play pinball even though it was the same game. So you'd have these halls of pinball that had dozens of machines lined up with different stories but essentially the same pinball game and this is how the pinball industry came back and started to sell a lot of games. In fact, the most popular pinball machine in history is actually the Adams Family which is not what you normally think of today, but at that time when it came back, the Adams Family series, the story, was very popular and pinball hit at that moment and they interwove that story into their game which helped them create a huge success.