not apply only to your company. Stay away from us, said Sarah. “We had to do a lot of work internally Part III: branded or trademarked terms. to convince people that picking the perfect name that A 30,000 • Consider whether the category name should everyone loved was never going to happen. That was build upon familiar terms or be entirely new. okay. You often see variations in the category name. Foot View Of Something too similar may be written off as Analysts often give categories names that are not the something your audience “already knows about.” ones used by vendors, for example. The most important The Category But something too foreign may be too difficult thing for us was to define the problem and create a point Design Process to grasp. “We ended up picking something of view. That’s what people should focus on.” that was similar to another term people in But the company didn’t choose a new category name our industry used,” said Sarah Elkins, VP, purely for semantics. Skyfii’s solution not only fused Demand Generation at Tasktop Technologies. together data from digital and physical sources (think “In the end, the name we picked best reflected airports, stadiums, retail outlets), its data scientists what people would call this category, and we were heavily involved in adding meaning to that data. went ahead knowing we’d have to do some work Neither of these characteristics was reflected in existing Remember that your to differentiate between the two terms.” Sarah categories. category story isn’t and her team ended up selecting value stream “ management for their category name, after Official vs. unofficial category names just about you. It’s realising that implementations of Agile and When I say category name, I’m not necessarily referring not a pitch for your DevOps were failing at scale. to the “official” terms that G2 and other review sites use. particular product or • Make sure the category name isn’t already used Sometimes, those official category names are the same in another context. Just because nobody in B2B ones used in conversation, like “project management company, it’s a pitch SaaS is using this term doesn’t mean it’s not used software”. When those line up with the category name for the category. in another industry. You’ll spend too much time you’ve defined yourself, that’s a bonus. But other times, ” battling for search traffic if this is the case. they diverge. For example, you won’t find “inbound marketing software” anywhere on G2, but that’s as — Brad Zomick • A category name that’s hard to pronounce or legitimate a category as any. remember. Your goal is to evangelize the category. Just like a good brand or product name, the The reverse is also worth considering. category name should be something that can stick Sometimes an “official” category name on G2 is never in your mind and be pleasant to say. used in practice, and you need to come up with your • Your category name doesn’t have to be perfect. It’s own. At BombBomb, we found ourselves in the “other unlikely everyone on your team will agree on it. If video software” category. This isn’t really a category, it’s close enough, then move on. It may also morph and it’s certainly not a term buyers are actively over time. Listen to the market – if it changes it to searching for. At the same time, our next best option an acronym, use the acronym. If it changes a word, was “video hosting software,” a category that covers a adapt. Defining the problem and category story is lot of unrelated solutions. Listing ourselves there would more important. lead to confusion for our buyers. To solve this, we’re actively working on a better term to describe what we While the category name may only consist of a few and our direct competitors do. Once that’s established, words, it may not be easy to land on one. “The name it will only help the entire category grow. of the category was a major source of contention for The Newcomer’s Guide to Category Design 23