This is what you do when you have a strange name and need everyone to remember you. Don’t be a little weird, stand on the edge of absurd.

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Dave Young:
Welcome back to the Empire Builders Podcast. Dave Young and Steve Semple here. Stephen, you told me the topic today, and it was sort of the joke of a lot of standup comedians, I think, in the ’70s because the brand had started growing and people are like, “What is a Nauga?” And I’m talking about Naugahyde. You mentioned that today’s subject is Naugahyde, and it’s sort of ubiquitous anymore. It’s sort of an old-timey joke now, but it was a thing and it ended up being kind of a big deal. So what is a Nauga?

Stephen Semple:
This is going to be a bit of a fun one. So Naugahyde is a brand of artificial leather. It’s basically vinyl. It’s composed of a knit fabric and expanded polyvinyl chloride PVC coating. And it was developed by Byron Hunter, who was a senior chemist at United States Rubber, and it’s now made by a spinoff of Uniroyal. It was invented in 1914, and it was the first rubber-based artificial leather ever made. The name was trademarked in 1936, and comes from where it was first produced, which is Naugatuck, Connecticut. So that’s the reason why they decided to use the great name Naugahyde. It’s such a good name, right?

Dave Young:
That’s our episode. Thanks for listening.

Stephen Semple:
So Naugahyde is mainly used for furniture. It’s easy to clean, long-lasting, and also you find it in car seats. But in 1960, competition started to rise in the vinyl furniture area. So they wanted to create a campaign to separate Naugahyde from the competition. So Uniroyal hired George Lewis and designer Kurt Wells. So here’s the challenge that they looked at. They said, “Naugahyde, it’s a hard name. What the heck are we going to do with this?”

Dave Young:
They named it in the 1930s?

Stephen Semple:
1936.

Dave Young:
Okay. And when did they hire this designer?

Stephen Semple:
Early 1960s.

Dave Young:
They went 30 years just saying Naugahyde.

Stephen Semple:
Right. Essentially in the early days, they didn’t have much competition. There weren’t other people making it. So it was sort of one of those ones. You’re the only game in town, or you’re the largest game in town. And then all of a sudden, other people started getting into the turf, and so they wanted to separate from it. So what George and Kurt did was they created a fictional character called the Nauga, and the hide of a Nauga is Naugahyde. Here’s the thing I found that was funny about it. Nauga’s easy to remember, and as soon as you think about that, all of a sudden Naugahyde becomes easy, because it’s a hide of a Nauga. And the Nauga is a colorful, horned, happy looking creature who’s native to the island of Sumatra, and was once hunted close to extinction. But hunting them for their hide is unnecessary because they painlessly shed their skin once a year. That’s the story they created.

Dave Young:
Of course it is. I don’t know. There’s probably no way to prove this, but I’ll bet you that the jokes about Naugahyde preceded that story. They probably just leaned into the story and because if this thing called Naugahyde existed and there wasn’t that story, you would be talking about, “Ha. We’re sitting on a Naugahyde booth in a restaurant. I wonder how many Naugas had to die to make this booth.” All of those jokes would’ve been there already. So this story capitalizes on this probably already rich tradition of people laughing about this was some kind of beast had to be skinned to make… It is like, “No, it’s just rubber on cloth is all it is.”

Stephen Semple:
That makes me think of an uncovery that you and I did recently. So we were at the Milwaukee Foot and Ankle Clinic, new client of ours, and they had already had this internal joke inside their own office where they had created this stick figure called Archie, who instead of putting up with walking on his feet, walked on his hands. Look, they even had a drawing and had their own T-shirts made of it. And it was an internal joke amongst the staff, which you and I and Matthew Burns are turning into a campaign. So you’re right. It may have already been there, but it doesn’t discount the brilliance of seeing that and going, “Let’s run with this. Let’s run with this.”

Dave Young:
Absolutely.

Stephen Semple:
And sometimes when it’s already there, it’s also better because it’s going to be embraced by the people, right?

Dave Young:
Yeah.

Stephen Semple:
Because they already loved it. They made it up themselves. So the campaign showed this funny character next to a chair, and the slogan was, “The Nauga is ugly, but its vinyl hide is beautiful.”

Dave Young:
Oh, yeah.

Stephen Semple:
They did this campaign called The Great Imposter, and I’ll read you some of the copy from the campaign. “That’s him. That’s the one that doesn’t move. The Nauga, but his vinyl hide, Naugahyde, can give you the most gratifying feeling known to man, getting away with something. Nauga can look amazing like anything. Cow’s hide? Beautiful. Horse hide? Beautiful. Alligator hide? Beautiful. Only your taxidermist will know, but unlike leather, Naugahyde won’t crack or stain.” It goes on to talk a little bit about it. They had even created this full size suit, and they had an ad showing the Nauga at a party with this slogan, “Invite a Nauga to your next party.”

And the copy was, “Make the Nauga feel welcome. Punch him in the nose the moment he comes through the door. Spill a Bloody Mary on him. Get a pie in the face. Smear chocolate on his chest. Kick him around. He’s indestructible. A soapy sponge and the Naugahyde comes clean,” and it goes on, but you get the idea. And there’s even this whole history that you can look up. You Google this, and there’s this whole history of this whole story and background story that they really leaned into it. The Nauga, the person in the suit, even appeared on the Johnny Carson show.

Dave Young:
Nice.

Stephen Semple:
Right?

Dave Young:
See, there you go.

Stephen Semple:
Right. And there’s even this fun point where there’s this New York comic. Al Rosenberg invented a fictional character named Earl C. Watkins, who spearheaded “Save The Nauga” project to save the Nauga from extinction. And he added this line that, “A herd of Nauga is often mistaken for a room full of furniture.”

Dave Young:
Oh gosh.

Stephen Semple:
Right?

Dave Young:
That’s brilliant.

Stephen Semple:
So there’s even comedians adding to the storyline, right?

Dave Young:
Yeah, from an almost dumb name, been around 30 years, you blossom into this whole rich story.

Stephen Semple:
Here’s what I loved about this campaign. Here’s what I loved about it. If you’re going to do something silly, you really have to lean into it. If you go part way with silliness, it does not work. It’s like a caricature drawing. If somebody’s got a little bit of a large nose and you draw a caricature where the nose is massive, it’s great. If you only draw it a little bit larger, it’s insulting. When you want to do something that’s fun and silly, you really need to go to the extreme. Because when you go to the extreme, everyone knows it’s a joke. If you only go part way, they’re not quite sure whether you’re joking with them or not. And so what I really love is they’re a very staid organization, and they went with this whole idea of the hide of a Nauga.

Dave Young:
Making it memorable, making it, in other words, famous. So you could call this artificial leather, but now you’re calling using a descriptor instead of this weird representational thing that compares it to actual leather. And it actually equates it in our minds to being way closer to actual leather than an artificial product made out of woven material and rubber laid over it. The goal is to become famous. You want right manufacturers to insist on Naugahyde. You want reupholsterers to buy rolls of Naugahyde, not just some vinyl, right?

Stephen Semple:
Correct.

Dave Young:
And so going back to our client in Milwaukee, his business, just like all his competitor’s businesses, they were all just some version of foot ankle specialist clinic with the name Milwaukee attached to it. How do you stand out? How do you stand out out in that? Literally, all you have to do is stand above your competitors and be more memorable than them, and the definition of that is, “Be famous.” So you just need a different name, a different approach, and maybe some fun.

And the other thing I did that was brilliant in this is Naugahyde is hard. They made it also instantly easier by taking half of it, the hide part, and all of a sudden, all you have to remember is Nauga and the hide comes naturally. If you have a weird name or a name that’s not standing out, what do you do? This is a great lesson for what it is. Dude, we’ve run into this before and there’s even some other ideas. So for example, a client of a partner of ours, Goettl Heating and Air Conditioning Air Conditioning, really tough name. So what do we do?

Well, we made it rhyme. G-O-E-T-T-L. It’s easy to say and it’s hard to spell. So when you make something a rhyme, it’s now all of a sudden what we know is rhyming, jingles. There’s a reason why we teach kids stuff in rhymes because it’s easier to remember. So one of the things you can do is you can create a rhyme. You can create a silly character, or one of my favorite is a client of yours, David, who came to you. BWS Heating & Air Conditioning.

Dave Young:
Plumbing, heating and air.

Stephen Semple:
So you guys ended up really figuring out a way to do repetition to make that work.

Dave Young:
Well, yeah, and on the face of it, we talked about renaming the company, and they decided at the end of the day, they didn’t want to do that. And BWS, its the founder’s initials. It’s a guy named Bruce Strandberg, but what do you do with that? The company’s BWS. They already have a logo. It’s on all their trucks, and if you’re going into mass media, you know that you’re like, “Oh my gosh. How do you get consumers to remember three letters that are disassociated the way these are?” They don’t seem to stand for anything because they’re just some guy’s initials, the founder. It’s not like the other three letter big company in Minneapolis, MMM, otherwise known as 3M.

They figured out how to make the best out of three letters, but it’s all the same letter. But in this case, you can’t just repeat, repeat, repeat. Got to do it in a fun way. So we created a character that’s not a named character. The character is really the voice of the voiceover radio announcer, and we write these things in a way that it’s fun to listen to him talk about what BWS might stand for. It’s sort of a combination, if you think in your head, if you’ve listened to the ads on our podcast before, you’ve heard a couple of them, and you’re like, “That voice is sort of weirdly familiar,” and it’s sort of a cross between Gary Owens and J. Peterman character from Seinfeld, and that’s by design. That’s what we intended that voice to sound like, because those are voices of people who, in our minds, we know, “Well, they’re sincere and trustworthy, but they’re just a little different than we are. They come at things from a quirky angle.”

Speaker 1:
When some people hear the name of our company, they scratch their heads and wonder, “What on earth do the letters B-W-S stand for?” Well sit back. I’ll tell you. B is for plumbing, hot water heaters, sewer lines, all the pipey plumbing things. W is for heating. We will get you through the winteries without a shiver. S is for air conditioning. Remember how hot the summer gets? A new summer is just around the corner, and your air conditioner had better be prepared for it. There you go. See, it’s all right there in the name, BWS Plumbing, Heating & Air Conditioning. It’s spelled B-W-S. Write it down. Oh, wait. Ready? That’s B-W-S. And when you want to find us online, just go to the Google and type in these letters, B-W and S plumbing, heating and air. You’ll find us.

Speaker 2:
(singing)

Speaker 1:
And also pronounced BWS.

Stephen Semple:
But the thing that you guys figured out with that is it’s really easy to say, “Oh, well, if we do repetition, people will remember it.” But in advertising, we ignore repetition unless you make it fun and entertaining. So, “B is for plumbing,” is ridiculous. That makes it entertaining. Or even I love the ones where you guys have done, “Baby wants some.” Baby wants some heating. BWS, baby wants some. Or even the one where you said, “B stands B.”

Dave Young:
So we want to repeat BWS as often as we can because we need people to remember that. We want to become famous for those three letters. So the joke of the announcer also is BWS. It’s, “Let me spell it for you. It’s spelled B-W-S, and by the way, coincidentally, it’s also pronounced BWS, and we also have a website. I guess you probably know where to find it, right? How hard could that be?”

Stephen Semple:
But even that’s a pattern interrupt, because you’re waiting for the person to say, “bws.com,” or whatever, and you don’t is even a pattern interrupt. So to me, the part when you’ve got a difficult name, lean into it. Create a rhyme, create a funny story, create a character, but do something that is interesting that suddenly makes it memorable. Because the plus side of all of that in the world today is, “Guess what’s available?” That URL’s available, and nobody’s fighting over those keywords. No one’s fighting over the keywords BWS. No one. That is easy-peasy lemon-squeezy. You got it. You got cheap keywords, you got a URL that you’re not fighting over space with others. So there’s also a positive to these difficult names, but you got to be creative around the repetition.

Dave Young:
The worst thing in the world is to have a name that’s just generic enough that you can get confused with all of your competitors. And that’s the situation we ran into with this podiatrist, right?

Stephen Semple:
Yeah.

Dave Young:
And honestly, he’s our client, and I don’t always remember the exact name of his business because it’s Milwaukee Foot and Ankle… Is it clinic? Is it specialist? Is it… Because both of those versions exist and they’re not him, right?

Stephen Semple:
Right.

Dave Young:
One of them isn’t. So your name is almost identical to all your competitors. They’re all some version of that, and so we came up with a name for him. All we have to do is make that name famous, and people find him because they search for something that’s not Milwaukee foot doctor or podiatrist.

Stephen Semple:
To me, the two lessons are… And the one that I really want people to take away, and it’s just an example of because the challenge was a hard name, if you’re going to do something silly and unusual, don’t go a little ways. You got to really lean into it and really own it, and then that will lead you to success, because not only will it make you memorable, but it also makes you likable.

Dave Young:
So well said. You don’t want to lean into something that’s going to be odd and weird. If you did Naugahyde with some story about, “No, we go to Africa and we harvest these animals,” nobody wants to hear that story. But, “Oh. It’s an animal that just willingly gives up its hide every year and hands it to you,” that’s kind of funny.

Stephen Semple:
Exactly.

Dave Young:
So you just lean in. If you’ve got a weird named company and you’re trying to figure this out, give us a call. We’ll help you.

Stephen Semple:
Yeah, that’s right. There’s fun in helping out with those ones. Absolute fun with helping.

Dave Young:
I love doing this kind of thing. This is my favorite kind of client.

Stephen Semple:
Absolutely. Absolutely.

Dave Young:
Thanks for bringing us the Naugahyde story.

Stephen Semple:
That’s it. The hide of a Nauga.

Dave Young:
Thanks for listening to the podcast. Please share us. Subscribe on your favorite podcast app and leave us a big fat juicy five star rating and review. And if you have any questions about this or any other podcast episode, email to questions@theempirebuilderspodcast.com.

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