If you design a product that sees ubiquity, you'll start hearing about all sorts of unintended uses; hence we have well-publicized tales of the iPod stopping a bullet and a Blackberry saving a man from plunging to his death.

But if you design a chemical that sees ubiquity, forget about it.

WD-40 was designed to prevent missiles from rusting. Last week I used it to free a photography strobe from a stubborn C-stand connector. Mechanics use it to loosen stuck fasteners. During the Vietnam War soldiers used to keep their rifles clean. According to the New York Times, "A bus driver in Asia used WD-40 to remove a python that had coiled itself around the undercarriage of his bus." According to surveys, WD-40 is present in 80% of American households and has at least 2,000 uses.

We're bringing this up because earlier this month John S. Barry, the man responsible for the spread of WD-40, passed away. We should point out that Barry didn't invent the stuff--that credit goes to Norm Larsen, an employee of Rocket Chemical who came up with it in 1953--but Barry, after taking control of Rocket Chemical in 1969, subsequently sent sales into the stratosphere.

From 1970 to 1990, annual sales went from $2 million to $91 million. That means sales went up more than $12,000 a day, every day, for twenty years. How did Barry do it?

Mr. Barry brought marketing coherence and discipline to the company. He spruced up the packaging and increased the advertising budget, but most of all he pushed for distribution. He emphasized free samples, including the 10,000 the company sent every month to soldiers in the Vietnam War to keep their weapons dry.

Within a little more than a decade, Mr. Barry was selling to 14,000 wholesalers, up from 1,200 when he started.

He kept tight control of the product. When Sears wanted to package WD-40 under its own label, Mr. Barry said no. When another big chain wanted the sort of price concessions to which it was accustomed, he refused.

He pushed to get WD-40 into supermarkets, where people buy on impulse. He also began an aggressive effort to sell WD-40 in foreign countries.

“We may appear to be a manufacturing company,” Mr. Barry said to Forbes, “but in fact we are a marketing company.”

Read more about Barry's marketing brilliance here.

via the new york times