Naming Rights: why the company that names the problem owns the market

The scene I'm in this week

Earlier this week I sat with the founder of a $22M cybersecurity company, replaying one of his team's discovery calls. Four minutes in, the buyer asked how the product handled a specific failure mode. The two-word phrase the buyer used to name that failure was coined by my client's competitor about eighteen months ago. I watched the founder's face while his rep answered. He knew exactly what had just happened.

The rep did fine, by the way. He answered thoroughly. That's what made it painful. The whole call ran inside a vocabulary another company invented. The buyer's evaluation checklist used the competitor's term. The analyst note the buyer had read used the competitor's term. By the time my client's product got a look, the exam had already been written by someone else, and every question on it was phrased in the examiner's favor.

Here's the part that stung. My client handles that failure mode better than the company that named it. He's been talking about the underlying problem for years, on calls, in all-hands meetings, in a hundred slightly different phrasings. He just never named it. His competitor did, once, in public, and planted a flag in ground my client had been standing on the whole time.

What's broken here has nothing to do with his product, his team, or his effort. He's been renting his words. And the rent just came due.

Naming what's actually broken

I call this the Rented Vocabulary: describing what you do in words somebody else coined. The category term an analyst invented. The framing your biggest competitor introduced. The same forty generic phrases every vendor in your space shares... platform, end-to-end, all-in-one, AI-powered. None of those words belong to you. Every time you use them, you strengthen whoever does own them.

Naming rights in a market work like naming rights on a stadium. The company that names the problem gets its flag on every conversation about that problem. Buyers repeat the name to each other. Analysts organize reports around it. AI engines attribute it. And the namer collects the biggest prize of all, presumed expertise: buyers assume whoever named the disease has the cure.

This is Solution-Centric Marketing doing quiet damage again. When your whole message describes your solution, you default to solution words, and solution words are the most rented words in B2B. There are only so many ways to say platform. There are infinite ways to name the specific pain your buyer is living in, because you're the one who's seen it up close. Buyers retain names. Descriptions evaporate somewhere between the demo and the elevator. I wrote about that memory problem in Why don't buyers remember what makes us different?: the thing that survives the meeting is the named idea.

This is just truth. Your market is going to use some name for the problem you solve. The only open question is who gets to write it.

Why this is worse now than ever

AI brought the cost of content to zero. Every vendor in your space can now produce infinite words about the same problem, and the models they're all using speak the same averaged dialect. Unnamed ideas dissolve into that average. A named idea is the one thing that survives it, because a coined term can't be averaged. It's either yours or it's absent.

Then look at where your buyers research now. They open ChatGPT and ask it to explain the space before they ever talk to a rep. ALM Corp's 2026 analysis of AI discoverability found that AI engines usually cite only 3 to 5 sources per topic. If you're one of the five, you're in the buyer's briefing. If you're the sixth, you don't exist. Here's the naming connection: engines cite what they can attribute. Nobody gets cited for saying end-to-end platform, because that phrase belongs to everyone, which means it belongs to no one. A coined term has an owner, a definition, and a source. That's exactly the shape of thing a model can retrieve and repeat.

We've lived this ourselves. Brand is the new backlink is a named idea, and it behaves like one: it travels without us in the room. The mechanics of getting machines to associate a concept with your company are in How do you build the entity authority AI engines actually trust?. The short version: consistency around named things is most of the game.

The diagnostic: whose words are you speaking?

Run these three tests this week. No agency, no budget, one honest afternoon.

1. 1The Whose-Words Test. Pull up your homepage and list the ten phrases doing the heaviest lifting. For each one, ask a single question: who coined this? Be honest. If the answers are 'the industry,' 'the analysts,' or 'our competitor,' you're renting every important word you use. One owned term out of ten is a start. Zero is a diagnosis.
2. 2The Repeat-Back Test. Play your last five discovery calls and count the moments a buyer repeats one of your phrases back to you unprompted. A named concept echoes. Generic language never comes back. If nothing you say gets repeated, nothing you say is being remembered, and the meeting after your meeting happens entirely in someone else's words.
3. 3The Glossary Test. Try to write a one-page glossary of terms your company owns outright... terms a competitor couldn't paste onto their own site without it reading as theft. Most founders start this page confidently and stall inside ten minutes. A blank glossary means you hold naming rights to nothing in your own market.

What I see across 200+ B2B companies

I've run some version of the Whose-Words Test across 200+ B2B companies in the $5M-$75M range, and the pattern barely moves. Maybe one company in ten owns a single term. The other nine describe themselves in the same rented forty words as everyone adjacent to them, then wonder why buyers mix them up with companies they consider beneath them.

The founders in that unlucky nine aren't lazy. Most of them are sitting on more naming raw material than they realize. In almost every discovery session I run, the founder says something offhand and sharp about the buyer's pain, a phrase no competitor could produce, and then never uses it again. The name is usually already in the room. Nobody's claimed it.

“Large language models value specificity. Vague descriptions will be less effective than concrete language.”

... ALM Corp, 2026 analysis of AI discoverability

Category creation is the maximal version of this play, and you don't have to go that far to start. How do you create a new market category? (without a Play Bigger budget) covers the full-frame version. Naming rights start smaller: name one failure mode, one diagnostic, one villain. Own a word before you try to own a market.

A real example

A healthtech company, low twenties in revenue, PE-backed. Their space had a standard-issue vocabulary, the same six phrases on every vendor's homepage, theirs included. In our second working session the founder described what actually goes wrong inside their buyer's operation. One sentence, completely offhand, more precise than anything on their website. We stopped the session, compressed that sentence into a two-word name, and rebuilt the message around it: the named problem first, the product as the obvious answer to it.

The name worked fast. Reps opened calls with the problem instead of the product, and buyers started finishing the sentence. About six weeks in, a prospect used the term in their own internal business case, unprompted. A quarter later came the best version of the outcome: a buyer asked one of my client's competitors how they handled the named problem, phrased exactly the way we'd coined it. The competitor had no answer, because the question itself was built from my client's frame. When you write the exam, everyone else studies for it. First-call-to-proposal time fell by roughly a third that quarter. The product hadn't changed at all. The words had.

What this means for you

Your market will name the problem you solve eventually. Analysts drift toward names. Buyers compress. Some competitor with a weaker product and a better sense of language is, right now, one blog post away from planting a flag in ground you've worked for years. Naming rights go to whoever does the naming, and there's no prize for having deserved the name. Three moves this week:

1. 1Mine your own transcripts. Pull your last ten sales calls and find the sharpest sentence anyone said about the buyer's problem. It's usually the founder talking, or a customer describing why they bought. Compress that sentence into a name of one to three words. Claim it before you polish it.
2. 2Evict one rented phrase. Find the most generic load-bearing phrase on your homepage and replace it with the named problem in your buyer's language. One swap. Watch what it does to your next ten first calls.
3. 3Publish the definition. Give the term a page: what it is, who suffers from it, what it costs, how to spot it. Humans need somewhere to send their colleagues. Machines need a source to cite. An owned term without a public definition stays a private joke.

If you want the system behind this, it's the framework I run every engagement on. Two of the four anchors of the Magnetic Messaging Framework (MMF) are naming jobs in disguise: villain framing gives the problem its name, and category design names the frame you want to be judged inside. The old-way / new-way contrast and the promised-land outcome then give the name somewhere to lead. The point of documenting all of it is repetition: once the names are decided and written down, every rep, every page, and every AI tool you use repeats the same coined language instead of improvising its way back into the rented kind.

This is the work I do all day. PitchKitchen builds Magnetic Messaging Frameworks for founder-led B2B companies in the $5M-$75M range. I fix broken marketing messages and underperforming websites for CEOs whose sales are stalling because the message isn't doing the work. I'm Greg Rosner, founder of PitchKitchen and author of Story Craft for Disruptors, and most of that book comes down to one move: finding the true thing only you can say, and giving it a name your market can carry. Naming rights in your market go to whoever does the naming first. That can still be you.