If you have a bottle of WD-40 lying around your house, you can probably thank marketing mastermind John S. Barry. The petroleum-based lubricant, widely popularized for its familiar blue and yellow aerosol can, can be found in nearly 80 percent of American homes. According to a New York Times article, the slippery stuff can be used over 2,000 ways, including stopping a squeaky hinge, removing road tar, and preventing rusting in your tools.

What can we learn from the story of WD-40? Marketing matters! Since every product needs a good marketing campaign, there are many different positions available in this rapidly-growing field.

John Barry, the driving force behind one of the most widely-known lubricants in the world, unfortunately died earlier this month in California. While he was not a part of the original marketing team when WD-40 (then known as Rocket Chemical) hit the shelves in 1958, sales skyrocketed when Barry arrived on the scene as president and chief executive of the company in 1969.

As one of his first acts as president and marketing guru, he changed the name of Rocket Chemical to the WD-40 Company, based on the inevitable truth that the business did not hawk rockets. Barry made it his mission to fiercely protect the secret formula, trademarks, and distinctive container of WD-40 because these factors contributed to the product’s broad marketing appeal. Under his guidance, the name of WD-40 quickly became synonymous with the product, in the same way that Kleenex monopolized the tissue industry.

In interviews with Forbes magazine, Barry admitted that his product is not unique. Other companies, such as industrial giants 3M and DuPont, developed products that had similar functions to WD-40. What made Barry different was his marketing technique. “What they don’t have,” Barry stated, “is the name”.

In order to re-vamp the company’s marketing game, Barry spruced up the packaging, increased the advertising budget, and pushed for distribution. In order to get people talking about WD-40, he distributed free samples, and sent 10,000 vials each month to the soldiers fighting in Vietnam so that they could keep their weapons dry.

This kind of press proved to be invaluable to the company. Within ten years, Barry had increased his wholesalers from 1,200 to a whopping 14,000. He pushed WD-40 into supermarkets and aggressively marketed the product in foreign countries. “We may appear to be a manufacturing company,” Barry told Forbes, “but in fact we are a marketing company”.

We can learn from John Barry that almost everything needs good marketing. Since millions of products are bought and sold in America every day, companies need to have an effective marketing campaign in order to be competitive in an increasingly global market.

Take Barry’s most clever marketing scheme, as a final example. The public’s enthusiasm for sending in ideas for using WD-40 mushroomed under his leadership. Thousands, if not millions, of people wrote in about how they used the product—including preventing squirrels from climbing into a birdhouse, freeing a tongue stuck to cold metal, and cleaning ostrich eggs. A bus driver in Asia even used WD-40 to remove a python that had coiled itself underneath a bus. Now, THAT’S good marketing at work!