In March 1984, Baltimore woke up to heartbreak—the Colts, their football team, had slipped away to Indianapolis in the middle of the night. Their owner, Robert Irsay, moved the team after the city refused to fund improvements to Memorial Stadium, and the Maryland legislature was preparing to seize the franchise through eminent domain. Suddenly, the Orioles looked like they might be next.

At the time, Migliara-Kaplan, my first research company, was just four years old when the Maryland Lottery Commission called us with a challenge: help us raise lottery revenues so the state can build a new baseball stadium and keep the Orioles from leaving. When I explained that I knew nothing about the lottery, their response was we were a Maryland-based marketing research firm and the project had to be executed with a Maryland firm.

They explained how the lottery worked: match 6 out of 40 balls and win $1 million. Five out of six paid $100,000; four out of six paid $1,000. Simple enough. I ran a series of focus groups with players. After one focus group, a participant came up to me afterward and gave me what turned out to be the key insight. After the session, he pulled me aside and said:

That resonated with me. I went back to the head of the lottery and pushed for a $150,000 conjoint study—an expensive bet at the time—that confirmed it: people didn’t care about the odds or the secondary prizes. All they cared about was the size of the jackpot. The smaller prizes really didn’t matter.

So, based on our findings, we restructured the game. Instead of 40 balls, there were now 48. Matching four out of six got you a free ticket, five out of six earned $1,000, and the minimum jackpot jumped to $5 million. We presented the revised structure to the Governor, who approved the changes.  Within a year, lottery revenues doubled—enough to fund Camden Yards and secure the Orioles’ future in Baltimore.

Soon, other states called us to do the same for them. I turned them down. Though it would have been good business, I disliked that the players who could least afford it were often the ones playing the game with the goal of maximizing how many people play. Even without our help, the lesson of Maryland’s success soon spread nationally.  Smaller states pooled together to also build bigger jackpots. That’s how Powerball was born.

The takeaway for me was lasting: marketing researchers often rely on large samples for confidence, but often the most transformative ideas come from just one voice. That one Baltimore player reshaped the lottery. I’ve seen the same happen in medicine, where one physician or patient sparks an insight that becomes the next breakthrough. As researchers, it is important to not just study our customers, but to really understand them.