Oddball Buildings Need Carpet, Too : Advertising: A new Du Pont campaign aimed at small-business owners will use California stores shaped like the products they carry to introduce a new brand of floor covering.

There will always be those who ridicule California as the home of the wacky. A new ad campaign for a Du Pont carpeting is about to give those critics more fodder.

The campaign features some of the funkiest-looking mom-and-pop shops in the state. All are California businesses housed in buildings that look like the products they sell.

There’s the doughnut-shaped Donut Hole in La Puente. There’s also the hot dog-like Tail O’ the Pup in West Hollywood. And, of course, the camera-shaped Photo Express in Westminster. Not to forget a shoe repair store in Bakersfield that looks like a giant shoe. Also, a heavy-equipment company in Turlock in a building designed to look like a bulldozer.

These--and several other California small businesses--are the off-the-wall centerpieces of a multimillion-dollar print and TV ad campaign for Du Pont Flooring Systems. The ads will all note: “No matter what they look like outside, businesses prefer Du Pont Certified Carpet inside.”

The purpose of the ads is to introduce a new name-brand carpet--Du Pont Certified. None of the ads show the carpet. None tell customers where to get the carpet. And none tell what the carpet costs. Rather, the ads simply use some of California’s most architecturally unusual small businesses to try to catch the eyes of small-business owners.

“Commercial carpeting is not the kind of thing that immediately leaps to peoples’ minds,” said Dave Nevergall, account supervisor at Rumrill Hoyt, the Rochester, N.Y., agency that created the campaign. “We’re trying to attract attention in a way that will be memorable.”

Certainly the ads will be memorable to some California residents. Of the 13 offbeat locations that will appear in the TV and print ads, eight are in California. And those who own the small businesses featured in the ads are pleased.

“We’ve been used in ads before,” said Eddie Blake, who has co-owned the 43-year-old hot dog stand, Tail ‘O the Pup, for 15 years. A recent picture of the stand in an advertisement for Haggar slacks boosted business a bit, he said. “People recognized the place in the ad, and they decided to come by.”

Photo Express, the drive-in film processing shop that looks like a camera, was also recently used in an ad for Avon.

“People called from all over and told me they saw the ad,” said Mary Dokter, who purchased the 11-year-old shop about a year ago. “But you don’t really get a lot of customers from these kinds of ads. It’s free coupons that bring in customers.”

Why did Du Pont select California businesses? “There just seems to be a greater number of these buildings in California,” said Alan Trei, marketing programs manager at Du Pont’s Flooring Systems division. “Sure, you can find some of these buildings in other places, but we didn’t want to take a film crew all the way to say, Lexington, Ky., just for one shot.”

Despite this large ad campaign for carpeting, Du Pont doesn’t actually make carpet. What Du Pont makes is the fiber that is used to make carpeting. In fact, no one makes more of it. Experts estimate that of the estimated $4.8 billion in commercial carpeting sold last year in the United States, Du Pont fibers were woven into nearly half of them.

Now, Du Pont wants more. “Obviously, their objective is to increase market share,” said Ron VanGelderen, president of the Carpet & Rug Institute, a trade group for carpet manufacturers based in Dalton, Ga. “They can probably do it, too.”

The way Du Pont executives figure it, every year about 8.5 million small-business owners buy new carpet--without consulting designers. These are the customers that the new Du Pont campaign will try to reach.

The campaign is scheduled to air next week on several cable-TV stations, including CNN and ESPN. It will also appear in issues of Architectural Digest, Fortune, Money and Time magazines.

But at least one marketing expert thinks that Du Pont is way off base.

“The ads seem to be equating Du Pont with something that is less than serious,” said Donald Kanter, professor of marketing at Boston University. “None of this will make any sense to the guy who is serious about his business. And I assure you, most small-business people are very serious about their businesses.”