How to earn the words your buyers use to describe you

Every founder I work with wants to be different.

They've built something that doesn't fit neatly into an existing category. The product spans workflows, blends clinical and consumer models, or introduces a way of working the market hasn't seen before. In their heads, the differentiation is obvious.

Then they open their laptop and read what buyers, analysts, and reporters are actually saying about them, and it sounds like everyone else.

That gap between how a company sees itself and how the market describes it is one of the most common and most expensive problems in healthcare marketing.

It's also the problem at the heart of category creation.

Category creation is a language problem

Most healthcare founders think about category creation as a product exercise. Build something novel enough, the thinking goes, and the market will invent a new word for it.

In practice, that almost never happens.

Buyers don't have the time, or the incentive, to invent new language. They reach for the closest existing shorthand: another vendor they've heard of, a familiar workflow, an old budget line. Whatever description gets picked up first tends to stick, whether it flatters your company or flattens it.

Category creation is really the practice of shaping that shorthand on purpose, before someone else does it for you.

It's a marketing problem because the deliverable is language, the exact words your buyers, partners, analysts, and hires use when you're not in the room.

Why healthcare makes this harder

Healthcare buyers are pattern matchers by necessity.

Clinicians read one-liners between patients. Health system executives evaluate dozens of vendors a quarter. Investors compare you against everything else in their pipeline. Everyone is looking for the fastest way to place you into a mental bucket so they can move on.

If your positioning doesn't offer them a bucket, they'll pick one anyway. Usually the wrong one.

That's how a purpose-built cardiovascular platform gets described as "another remote monitoring tool." How a serious clinical decision support product ends up compared to a consumer wellness app. How a specialized commercialization partner gets slotted next to generalist agencies.

None of that is a product failure. It's a language failure.

The three words test

The simplest diagnostic I use with founders is what I call the three words test.

Ask ten people who should know your company — a customer, a prospect, an investor, an advisor, a former colleague, a candidate you interviewed — how they'd describe what you do in three words or one short sentence. Don't lead them. Just listen.

You're looking for three things:

• Consistency. Do they use similar language, or is every answer different?
• Accuracy. Does the description reflect what you actually sell and to whom?
• Distinctiveness. Could that same sentence describe five other companies in your space?

In most healthcare companies I meet, the answers are all over the map. That inconsistency isn't a communication problem. It's a positioning problem. The market is generating its own language because you haven't given it one worth repeating.

What earning the language actually requires

Earning the words your buyers use to describe you is a strategic act, not a copywriting exercise.

In the engagements where I've seen this work well, four things tend to be true.

• The category frame is clear. Leadership can articulate the shift they believe is happening in the market and where their company sits inside it, not just what the product does.
• The customer conflict is named. Positioning names the specific tension the buyer is trying to resolve, in the buyer's own words, not the company's.
• The language is repeatable. Sales, marketing, product, and executives all describe the company using overlapping words. Employees can pass the test on their first week.
• The proof points are chosen deliberately. Case studies, thought leadership, and PR are all working the same category story, not making separate arguments.

When those four things are in place, the market starts to echo the company's language back in analyst reports, in RFPs, in board decks. That echo is what category creation actually looks like from the outside.

Where founders go wrong

I see the same missteps often enough that they're worth naming.

The first is confusing novelty with clarity. A new capability is not a new category. If a buyer can't quickly explain who else they'd compare you to and why you're different, novelty is working against you, not for you.

The second is trying to own too much. Ambitious founders often want their company to be about transformation, equity, access, cost, and outcomes all at once. Language stretched that thin doesn't stick anywhere.

The third is delegating positioning entirely to marketing. Category-defining language has to be owned by the CEO and reinforced by the executive team. When the founder and the head of sales describe the company differently, the market defaults to whichever version is louder, usually the sales version, minus the strategy.

The fourth is treating positioning as a one-time project. Categories evolve. Buyers evolve. The language that opened doors two years ago can quietly become a ceiling on your growth.

A quieter, more durable version of category creation

There's a version of category creation that gets a lot of attention: the loud, PR-driven, "we invented this space" version. It works for a handful of companies and blows up for many more.

The version I care about is quieter.

It looks like a company whose customers all describe the value in strikingly similar language. Whose sales cycles get shorter because prospects show up already primed with the right frame. Whose analysts and reporters reach for the company's own words when they write about the space. Whose new hires can articulate the strategy on day one.

That kind of category leadership doesn't come from declaring a new category. It comes from doing the harder, slower work of shaping the language buyers use before anyone else does it for you.

Where to start

If you suspect the market is describing your company in ways that don't quite fit, a few starting moves tend to be more useful than a full rebrand.

• Run the three words test with ten people this month and write down the exact language they use.
• Map that language against how your executive team describes the company internally.
• Identify the one sentence you'd most want a buyer to repeat back to you, and pressure-test it against reality.
• Audit where that sentence shows up today: website, sales deck, LinkedIn, PR, case studies, hiring pages. Fix the biggest gaps first.

Category creation isn't about inventing a word no one has heard before. It's about earning the right words your buyers already want to use and making sure your company is the one they attach them to.

That's marketing's job. And in healthcare, it's often the difference between being seen as another vendor and being seen as the answer.