A name used internally for a year was about to launch
A product marketing team at a payments business had settled on a name for its category. The name had been used in every internal meeting for a year, and it was about to go on the website and into every sales deck. By then the word had stopped sounding like a choice and started sounding like the name for the thing. The team wanted to know whether buyers used it too.
Showing buyers a name and asking whether they like it will get an answer. It cannot show what those buyers would have said on their own, and that unprompted wording is what a search query and a budget line are made of. So the work had to capture buyers’ own words before it showed them anything.
We asked buyers to describe the problem before naming it
We ran an opinion survey across a screened panel of operations leads, finance buyers, and the risk and compliance people who approve a purchase. Every respondent was screened for evidence of a live evaluation or a completed purchase in the category, so the answers came from people who were actually buying. The survey opened by asking them to describe the problem in their own words.
Only after that was captured did we show the candidate names, which keeps recognition of a name separate from how naturally people already speak. We recorded the unprompted answers word for word instead of grouping them into categories, because the value sat in the exact phrasing. Nobody in the survey was told which company was asking.
The name held and the words around it changed
Buyers used the name, or used something close enough that they recognized it straight away. That was not what the team had braced for. What did change was everything around it: the supporting language in the deck and on the website turned out to be internal vocabulary, and the survey handed the team replacement wording taken straight from buyers.
The team kept the name and replaced the language around it. The list of buyer terms also went to the search and content teams, who used it well beyond the launch it was commissioned for.
