In the early 2000s, WD-40 Company was working hard to expand into China. I had built a global business by then, but China was different. The auto industry there was growing, the manufacturing base was massive, and on paper we should have been a perfect fit. So I went to a trade show in Shanghai myself, set up a booth with my Chinese colleagues, and started handing out free samples of WD-40.

Nobody wanted it.

People walked right past us. I asked my booth buddies if I was pronouncing the name wrong. “You’re saying it right,” they reassured me. So why don’t they need my WD-40? Then I noticed another booth down the row with a line that stretched as far as I could see. Same trade show, same crowd, completely different response. I wandered over to see what they were giving away.

A small brown paper bag with a string handle on it. Empty. Just the bag.

Trade shows are full of cheap freebies that appeal to the inner child in all of us, but an empty paper bag was a new one. I asked, “Why are people lining up for this?” The booth owners explained that the bag was exactly the right size for the perfect scoop of rice that would accompany their customers’ lunch. It might be empty now, but it would be useful at noon.

That moment, standing in a trade hall in Shanghai watching auto-industry buyers line up for a paper bag while ignoring my “world’s most useful lubricant,” was the most expensive marketing lesson I have ever received. And it cost me nothing. The product was not the problem. The message was. This is the story I tell founders and B2B marketers more than any other, because almost every stuck go-to-market I have ever seen is some version of the same mistake.

TLDR

• WD-40 nearly failed in China because we were selling lubrication into a market that already had free lubrication. The product was right. The message was wrong.
• The fix was a single repositioning. Same can, same formula, new promise: anti-rust oil. Crowds appeared within minutes.
• Most founders and B2B marketers respond to weak traction by pushing harder on the existing message. The better move is to stop pushing and ask why your customers do not need what you are selling.
• Al Ries’s Focus and Clayton Christensen’s Jobs to Be Done framework both arrive at the same conclusion: markets buy outcomes, not features.
• Humility, the willingness to be wrong about your own value proposition, is the most underused tool in product marketing.

Why Was WD-40 Failing in a Country That Should Have Loved It?

WD-40 was failing in China because we were solving a problem the market did not have. Chinese auto shops already had plentiful access to lubricant. They used dirty diesel oil straight from the can, and it was free. When I offered them a paid product that did the same job they were already doing for nothing, they did the rational thing. They walked past me.

The mistake was not in the product. The mistake was in the assumption that a value proposition built in one market would translate to another. We had spent years teaching American customers to think of WD-40 as the convenient, all-purpose lubricant. That message worked in markets where the alternative was inconvenient lubrication. It did not work in markets where the alternative was free lubrication.

This is the trap most founders fall into. They build a product to solve a problem they have personally experienced, then assume every prospective customer experiences that problem the same way. When the message does not land, they push harder. More ad spend. More sales calls. More demos. None of it works, because none of it addresses the actual gap between what the market needs and what they think they are buying.

So my Chinese colleagues and I wandered the hall and asked one simple question of the people who had ignored us: “Why don’t you need lubricant?” The answer arrived in minutes. They did not need lubricant. They needed something for rust. And rust was a problem we already knew how to solve.

How Does One Question Change a Go-to-Market Strategy?

The question that changed our China launch was the one most founders refuse to ask: “Why don’t you need this?” Not “let me convince you that you do.” Not “let me show you the value.” Just “why don’t you need this?” Asked with genuine curiosity, that question opens a door no amount of pushing can open.

We changed our message that afternoon. Same product. Same can. Same formula. New language: anti-rust oil. We worked with a translator to make sure the Mandarin phrasing was right. Within minutes of unveiling the new message, we had a crowd at the booth so large we needed help managing it. The same buyers who had walked past us an hour earlier were lining up for the same product they had previously dismissed.

The whole China expansion strategy got rebuilt around that one repositioning. We were not just selling lubricant. We were selling anti-rust oil. The Chinese auto market eventually became one of our most important growth engines, and it all started with a question I would not have asked if a brown paper bag had not embarrassed me first.

“Same product. Different value promise. Different message. Voila. An unexpected, undiscovered, unmet need. Now it’s an opportunity.”

This is the work most go-to-market strategies skip. They optimize the channel, the targeting, the funnel, the copy. All of that matters. But none of it matters if the underlying promise is wrong for the market you are in.

What Did Al Ries Mean When He Said Focus Is the Key to the Future?

Al Ries spent his career arguing that companies fail because they try to be everything to everyone, and brands win when they own one specific position in the customer’s mind. In Focus: The Future of Your Company Depends on It, he made the case that the more variations you add to a brand, the weaker it becomes. The discipline of focus is the discipline of deciding what you will not be.

In Shanghai, I had a focus problem disguised as a marketing problem. WD-40 in the United States meant “use it for everything.” That is a powerful position in a market that already understands the category. It is a confusing position in a market that has never needed the category, because it forces the buyer to do the cognitive work of figuring out which of the forty thousand possible uses applies to them. The brown paper bag won because it was specific. The rice fit. End of story.

When we repositioned the product as anti-rust oil in China, we were not changing the company. We were narrowing the position. We picked one job the market was actually trying to get done, and we owned it. Ries would have recognized the move immediately. Specificity beats generality in any market where the customer does not already understand why you matter.

The founders I coach most often need to hear this when they are scaling internationally or moving into a new segment. The position that built the company is rarely the position that wins the next market. Holding too tightly to the original message is the most common form of focus failure I see.

How Does the Jobs to Be Done Framework Make This Practical?

Clayton Christensen’s Jobs to Be Done framework gives the China story a name and a method. People do not buy products. They hire products to do a job. The job to be done by Chinese auto-shop owners in 2003 was not “lubricate a hinge.” Lubrication was free. The job was “stop my equipment from rusting.” That was the unmet need. That was the door we could not open until we stopped pushing the wrong product description.

According to Harvard Business School research that Christensen drew on for years, between 75 and 85 percent of all new products launched into the market fail financially. His explanation was simple. They do not target a job that people are actually trying to get done. They target a demographic, a category, a product feature, or a use case the founder finds compelling. The customer does not care about any of those things. The customer cares about the job.

The fastest way to identify the real job is to talk to people who are not buying from you. Not your best customers. Not your champions. The people who looked at your product and walked away. They are the ones holding the information you need. In Shanghai, my best informants were the auto-shop buyers who had ignored my booth. They told me, in plain language, that the dirty diesel oil was already doing the job I was trying to sell them on. I had to be quiet long enough to hear it.

“Customers don’t buy products; they pull them into their lives to make progress.”

Christensen’s framing changes the question every founder and B2B marketer should be asking. Instead of “how do I sell more of this,” the question becomes “what progress is my customer trying to make, and am I helping them make it?” If the answer is yes, the message writes itself. If the answer is no, no amount of paid acquisition will save the launch.

Why Is the Real Skill Humility, Not Persistence?

The conventional advice for a struggling launch is to push harder. More ad spend, more demos, more outbound, more conviction. The Shanghai story argues for the opposite. The breakthrough came when I stopped pushing and started asking. Humility is not a soft virtue in product marketing. It is the operational discipline of admitting your message might be wrong and then doing the work to find out what would be right.

Whitney Johnson’s book Disrupt Yourself makes a related point about personal growth and career reinvention. She argues that the people who keep growing are the ones who voluntarily climb a new learning curve before the old one runs out. The same principle applies to a go-to-market. The position that built your first wave of revenue has a natural ceiling. The willingness to start over on a new learning curve, including a new market message, is what separates companies that compound from companies that plateau.

Most founders resist this because the original message feels like part of their identity. They invested years building the conviction that this is what the product means. Walking away from that conviction, even partially, feels like a defeat. It is not. It is the cost of admission to the next stage of growth.

The Shanghai trip taught me three habits I have used in every market entry, product pivot, and category expansion since. First, before you spend money on more marketing, spend time with the people who said no. Second, the customer’s actual job is almost never the job described in your category. Third, the most expensive word in any go-to-market is “should.” If they should want it, but they do not, you have a positioning problem, not a customer problem.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is the Anti-Rust Lesson?

The Anti-Rust Lesson is the principle that a stuck product is almost always a message problem rather than a product problem. The lesson comes from WD-40 Company’s early expansion into China, where we initially failed to attract buyers for our lubricant. Once we repositioned the product as anti-rust oil to match the actual job the market needed done, demand appeared immediately.

How should a founder respond when a launch is not gaining traction?

Stop pushing the existing message and start asking the people who said no why they said no. Most founders respond to weak traction by spending more on the channels that are already not working. The better move is to talk to non-buyers and ask one question: why do you not need this? The answer will almost always point to a Jobs to Be Done gap between the product and the market.

What is Jobs to Be Done in plain language?

Jobs to Be Done, a framework popularized by Clayton Christensen of Harvard Business School, says customers do not buy products. They hire products to do specific jobs. The framework asks founders and marketers to identify the underlying progress a customer is trying to make rather than the demographic, category, or feature they assume describes that customer.

Why is Al Ries’s Focus relevant for international expansion?

Al Ries argued that brands win by owning a single, specific position in the customer’s mind. When companies expand internationally, the position that worked in one market often confuses customers in another, because the category itself may not exist yet for them. Ries’s advice is to narrow rather than broaden when entering a new market. Pick one job, own it, and expand later.

How is this connected to Whitney Johnson’s Disrupt Yourself?

Whitney Johnson’s Disrupt Yourself argues that growth requires voluntarily stepping onto a new learning curve before the old one runs out. The Anti-Rust Lesson is the marketing equivalent. The message that built your first wave of revenue will eventually stop working. Founders who disrupt their own positioning before the market forces them to are the ones who keep compounding.

What is the single most useful question for a stuck go-to-market?

The single most useful question is: “Why don’t you need this?” Asked with genuine curiosity to the people who walked away from your product, that question opens a door no amount of additional ad spend can open. It is the question that saved our China launch and the question I still recommend to every founder and B2B marketer facing weak traction.

Stop Selling. Start Listening.

The hardest part of building a product company is not the building. It is the willingness to be wrong about why the product matters. Every founder I have ever worked with has at least one Shanghai moment in their future, a market or segment or customer cohort where the message they built the company on simply does not land. The leaders who scale through that moment are the ones who treat it as new information rather than as a rejection.

The next time your launch is underperforming, before you commission another campaign or hire another seller or rewrite another deck, do what I should have done before I got on the plane to Shanghai. Find ten people who looked at your product and said no. Ask them why. Listen long enough to hear the answer beneath the answer. There is a brown paper bag somewhere in your market telling you something your category has missed. The question is whether you will notice it before it notices you.

If you want to go deeper on building a culture where curiosity and listening become operational habits, visit The Learning Moment to explore the frameworks, tools, and coaching that help leaders make this shift in their own organizations.