Competing to be the best in an existing category is a low-ceiling game, and most founders play it without noticing there's another board. They write positioning that sounds like "the CRM but faster," "the data warehouse but cheaper," "Zendesk but with AI" — comparative, deferential, framed entirely in the incumbent's vocabulary. Every one of those sentences hands the incumbent something more valuable than market share: the frame. It concedes that the buyer's question is already settled, that the category exists, that the only open variable is who fills it best. The company that instead names a new category — a new problem, or a new way of seeing an old one — wins a different and larger prize. It wins before the comparison starts, because it wrote the question the comparison is answering.
This is not a branding aesthetic or a copywriting trick. It's a claim about how purchase decisions are actually structured, and once you see the structure, "just name it" stops sounding like fluff and starts looking like the highest-leverage move on the table.
The buyer categorizes before they compare
A purchase is two decisions, and almost everyone obsesses over the second while the first quietly decides the outcome. First the buyer categorizes: what kind of thing is this, and what does "good" look like for this kind of thing? Only then do they compare instances within the category they've settled on. Stage one sets the consideration set and the evaluation axes — the rubric. Stage two grades the contenders against that rubric. Founders pour nearly all their competitive energy into stage two, into being a better answer, while stage one silently determines which question is even being asked.
A category is a mental model the buyer loads before evaluating anything. It tells them which vendors belong in the room, which attributes matter, and how much each attribute weighs. When a CFO decides she's buying "expense management software," she has already, invisibly, decided the relevant axes are approval workflows, ERP integrations, and per-seat price — and she'll rank every demo on those. The vendor who later shows up arguing that the real problem is spend visibility in real time, not reimbursement after the fact is not offering a better product on her axes. He's trying to swap the rubric. If he succeeds, her checklist changes, and the vendors who were winning on the old axes are suddenly answering a question nobody's asking.
Here's the part that makes naming strategic rather than cosmetic: the criteria favor whoever wrote them. No one designs a category whose evaluation axes make them look average. You install the mental model in which your particular strengths are the things that matter and your weaknesses are things a serious buyer has learned not to care about. Gong didn't enter as a better call-recording tool competing on storage and transcription accuracy; it named "revenue intelligence" and installed the belief that the important thing was mining conversations for deal signal — an axis on which the old recording vendors weren't even contestants. HubSpot didn't fight for share in "marketing software"; it named "inbound marketing" and made the whole outbound-first world look like the past. Salesforce ran "No Software" as a category-defining assault that reframed on-premise incumbents not as strong competitors but as the thing you were escaping. In each case the winner didn't climb the existing hill faster. They pointed at a different hill and got the market to agree that was where the summit was.
Comparison is a Red Queen race; naming changes the landscape
Leigh Van Valen's Red Queen hypothesis, from his 1973 work on extinction rates, makes a claim that maps precisely onto feature competition: in a system where your rivals are coevolving against you, you have to keep improving continuously just to hold your relative position, because every gain you make is matched by gains around you. Fitness is relative, so the ground moves under you. Run as fast as you can and you stay in the same place.
Comparative positioning locks you into exactly this race. Accept the category "CRM" and compete on being faster and cheaper, and you're on a shared fitness landscape climbing the same peak as everyone else. Your speed advantage this quarter is copied next quarter; your price cut is matched; the axis is fixed and everyone grinds along it, absolute costs rising while relative positions barely move. That's the feature war, and it's a war precisely because the terrain is agreed. Everyone's optimizing the same function.
Naming a category is not running faster on that landscape. It's redrawing the landscape so there's a new peak that, for a while, only you occupy. You're no longer a marginally fitter instance of a known species competing for the same niche; you've defined a new niche and declared yourself its default. The incumbents don't get to be "worse at revenue intelligence" — that would still put them in your category. They get to be a different kind of thing, one the buyer now files under "the old way." A weaker competitor on your axes is still a competitor. A vendor the buyer no longer thinks belongs in the room isn't losing the comparison. It's not in it.
That's the whole asymmetry. Win the market and you've topped a ranking someone else built. Name the market and you built the ranking, put yourself at the top, and defined everyone else's distance from you as their defining feature.
When it works, and when it's cargo cult
This is also where founders hurt themselves, because the move is seductive and the fake version is cheap to attempt. Renaming an existing thing fools no one. Sell helpdesk software, rebrand it "customer experience orchestration," ship the identical product, and you've created a category with exactly one member and no believers — buyers test the new frame against their reality, find no shift underneath it, and slot you right back into "helpdesk, with a pretentious name." The category has to correspond to a real change in the buyer's world: a new problem that genuinely emerged, or a genuine reframe that makes people say yes, that's actually what's going on, I'd just never named it. Gainsight's "customer success" landed because subscription economics had made retention a distinct discipline from support, and companies felt the pain without having a word for it. The word crystallized something real. It didn't invent something fake.
Which means category design is downstream of an insight asymmetry — of knowing something true about the market that the consensus hasn't priced in yet. That's the same edge I've argued is the thing you should actually screen founders for, because founder-market fit predicts outcomes earlier and more reliably than product-market fit: the right to name a category is earned by seeing the shift first and from the inside, and by having the standing to make the market believe you. A founder who lived the problem can name it with a specificity that reads as truth. A founder reaching for a fresh noun because the old market is crowded is guessing at a frame, and buyers smell the difference between a name that reveals something and a name that's fleeing a comparison. The frame has to be a discovery, not a dodge.
Installing a category is a costly signal
Even with a true insight, a category doesn't install itself. The buyer has to learn a new mental model, which is slow, effortful, and expensive — you're funding the education of a market that has no budget line, no search term, no analyst quadrant for what you sell. You are, at your own cost, teaching people to want a thing they didn't know was a thing. That's years of conference talks, a manifesto, a point of view repeated until it's boring to you and just becoming audible to them, an ecosystem of consultants and job titles and benchmarks that all presuppose your frame.
The expense is not a bug. It's what makes the position credible and defensible, for the same reason your best marketing often looks like waste: sustained, visible, unattributable evangelism is a costly signal in Zahavi's strict sense — a handicap a me-too competitor structurally won't pay. Anyone can copy your feature list overnight. Almost no one will spend three years and a founder's reputation evangelizing a worldview, because if the category doesn't take, that spend is torched with nothing to show. The willingness to pay the cost is itself evidence you believe the shift is real, and it's precisely why fast followers rarely capture a category even when their product is comparable. They showed up to sell into demand; they never paid to create it. The reference-point slot went to whoever educated the market, and education doesn't refund to the second payer.
I feel this running my own company. Kommerce isn't positioned as "Shopify for developing markets" — that comparison would cede the frame and invite a checklist I'd lose on. It's a commerce operating system for trust-scarce markets, where the load-bearing problem isn't storefronts or checkout but the absence of institutional trust between buyer and seller. Naming that problem is a bet that the shift is real and that I've seen it from close enough to have the right to name it. If I'm right, the criteria that matter — fraud control, cash-on-delivery reliability, trust between strangers — are axes I built and can win on. If I'm cargo-culting, the market will hand me back my noun and ask how I compare to Shopify. The frame is a claim I have to keep paying to defend.
What to do about it
Open the doc where your positioning lives and find every sentence that defines you by reference to a competitor or an existing category — "like X but," "the Y for Z," "faster/cheaper/simpler than the incumbent." Each of those is you competing on someone else's rubric. Delete them, and force yourself to answer a harder question: what is the new problem, or the new way of seeing the problem, that you want this market to adopt? Write it as a claim about the buyer's world, not about your product. Then run the only test that matters. Say it to ten real prospects and listen for whether they repeat it back to you in their own words — to a colleague, in a follow-up, unprompted. If they do, you've installed a mental model, and you should pour resources into evangelizing the category, not just shipping the product, because the category is the asset. If they can only describe you as a version of an existing thing, you don't have a category yet. You have a feature, and a feature war waiting for you.
The market you can win is a ranking someone already wrote. The market you name is the one where you wrote the ranking — and put everyone else below the line before they knew there was a line.