In 2001, the Royal Mail decided it needed a grander name.
So it became Consignia.
Cost a fortune. Meant nothing. Nobody knew what it was. You couldn’t post a letter to it.
Sixteen months later, it quietly went back to being the Royal Mail.
They’d taken a word the entire country understood. And replaced it with one nobody did.
Frustratingly, we did a smaller version of the same thing. We made it much harder to compare API Gateways.
The wrong word, not the wrong feature
A prospect was evaluating us. They went looking for a capability they knew by the name that a larger, legacy, competitor uses. We have that same capability.
We just call it something else.
So for a moment, they concluded we didn’t have it at all. They searched for the word they knew, didn’t find it, and started to walk.
We caught it. Just.
In a market you didn’t create, your clever new vocabulary isn’t an asset. It’s a liability.
Prospects don’t investigate. They discard.
A prospect will not spend time to understand your particular worldview. They have a shortlist, a deadline and a day job.
So when they hit a word they don’t recognise, they don’t pause to admire the innovative framing, they discard it.
They move on to the vendor whose feature names match the picture already in their head.
The company that created a category also wrote its dictionary. Tens of thousands of people now think in those words. You turn up later with a better mousetrap, insist on calling it a “rodent relocation appliance”, and congratulate yourself on the branding.
Congratulations! You’ve added a translation step to every evaluation.
Use the word that already exists
Even when your version works a little differently, reach for the term the market knows. Then explain how yours differs.
A direct match with a footnote beats a brand new word every single time.
When you have more users than the people who named the category, fine. Rename whatever you like.
Until then, you speak the language of the many. We’re not going to rewrite a whole market’s vocabulary this year. So we’d better learn to speak it.
This is bigger than feature names, by the way. Category design is one of the quietest, most powerful advantages in business, precisely because whoever frames the problem usually wins the right to sell the answer.
If you didn’t get to frame it, fighting the frame is a losing game. Meet people inside the words they already use. Earn the right to expand them later.
(There are some sharp elbows out right now in our market, as vendors seek to influence Gartner for the right to define the AI Gateway and AI Management categories. Gartner’s entire business seems to rest on somehow claiming this right and selling it back to vendors.)
What good looks like
Name things the way buyers search for them. Not the way your engineers think about them.
Your architecture can be as distinctive as you like. Your labels should be boringly familiar.
When you genuinely do something better, lead with the familiar name and use the difference as the upgrade. “Yes, we do that, and here’s why ours is better.” Not “we don’t have that, we have this other thing you’ve never heard of.”
Treat your website and docs as a translation layer for switchers. Someone moving from a competitor should find every concept they rely on, under the name they already use, on day one.
The objection, and it’s a good one
The best pushback came from my own team. And it’s right enough that I’ll put it here rather than bury it:
“Borrowing someone else’s word is dangerous when your thing is genuinely different under the hood.”
The customer expects the behaviour the word implies. When your internals don’t deliver exactly that, you’ve broken trust at a deeper level than a naming mismatch ever could.
So here’s my line in the sand:
Match the vocabulary of value. Don’t fake the vocabulary of mechanism.
Use industry-standard language for what something does. The capability. The outcome. The job the buyer is hiring you for.
Be far more careful borrowing terms for the parts that do it, especially when those parts work differently.
So
The Royal Mail had a word the whole country understood. They paid millions to replace it with one nobody did. Then paid again to undo it.
We nearly lost a deal over a single word this week.
Different scale. Same mistake.
The word your customer already uses is worth more than the creative one you’d rather use.
Use theirs.
