The other day, I was describing to a friend the idea my team and I have been working on. "Oh," they said, "So you're fixing market research."
But that's not what we're doing at all. We're not repairing something that is broken. We're combining things in a new way that historically haven't worked together—we're innovating, not fixing.
And because this innovation hasn't existed before, it doesn't have a name.
And because it doesn't have a name, it can be hard to describe—at least at first.
I'm realizing that's a conundrum innovators face: Innovation outpaces language. You know the painstaking nuance of what your creation does and why it matters, but the words you need to make other people get it quickly just don't exist yet.
That's especially problematic: Try convincing a brand you can figure out what their customers think using something that you can't even describe to them.
Explaining something for which there isn't yet a category for is a struggle, but it's part of the work of building something new.
Innovation Outpaces Language
Think of the iPhone. When it was introduced, it was called "a phone, an iPod, and an internet communicator." That's not technically wrong, but it also fails to capture what made the device so singular and exciting.
Uber faced a similar roadblock: When people called it a taxi service, the most accurate response initially was "...kinda?"
Only once we were able to conceptualize these items as belonging to completely new categories ("smartphone," "rideshare") could we fully embrace the paradigm shift they represented.
And it's not a branding problem, or at least it's not only a branding problem.
Those of us in market research know (perhaps better than anyone) that labels transcend mere semantics. What we call something shapes how we see it, how we relate to it, how we use it—and whether we use it at all.
Research suggests that when we don't have the words to explain something, we struggle to understand it at all.
So here I am with this brand new tool—one that leverages the psychology that drives how people think, decide, and act; one that uses gen AI to blend data science, behavioral research, and human insight in a completely unprecedented way—and my choices for descriptors are all based in where market research has grown out of, not where it's going: "survey," "discussion guide," "focus group."
Those labels aren't totally wrong, but they are profoundly inaccurate. And, most important, they keep us tethered to legacy assumptions about what research can and can't do.
Existing language in market research forces us into either/or categories—quantitative vs. qualitative, questionnaire vs. discussion guide, respondent vs. participant, and so on. Those binary formulations limit our ability to truly understand people.
What's needed is a more human-centered, possibility-driven approach to insight that doesn't just measure what is but uncovers what could be.
Addressing that gap isn't "fixing" market research any more than the iPhone "fixed" the telephone. The existence of the telephone made the iPhone possible—but the phone was never "broken."
As an industry, we're already wrestling with data overload, survey fatigue, and the perennial catch-22 between qualitative and quantitative data. Those are methodological challenges, yes—but they're also linguistic ones.
If our vocabulary keeps us stuck in old categories, we risk limiting the solutions we can imagine.
Preciousness vs. Precision
So how do you explain something that doesn't fit the labels we're accustomed to? My team and I decided to stop using many traditional market research designations when they're not really right. We've landed on the term "discussionnaire" to describe the research tool. It's not a survey. It's not a discussion guide. It's both—and neither.
The name is less about clever branding and more about survival.
If we called it a "discussion guide," you'd expect one thing, if we called it a "questionnaire," you'd expect another. And neither would be accurate. So when my team and I call it a new, third thing, we're not being precious. We're being precise. At the very least, we're opening up a moment to pause and discuss the difference.
That's what it means to work in uncharted territory. The words don't exist yet, so you invent them. And they will sound awkward, at first. Eventually, though, the right words will come: That's what happened with "smartphone," "rideshare," "streaming TV."
They all sounded clunky and awkward at first. Then, one day, they didn't.
When Existing Molds Don't Fit, You Have to Break Them
"This," as a friend recently told me, "is the real founder shit." Not the pitch deck or sales projections, but the existential work of trying to name what doesn't exist yet. It's the unglamorous, unexpectedly philosophical side of innovation, and that's especially true for something as ephemeral as market research.
So if you're struggling to explain what you've built, welcome to the club. The technical work is hard. But the linguistic work—the strategic choice of metaphor, the patient repetition, the willingness to be misunderstood—is just as essential.
If it feels frustrating, that's not a red flag. That's a sign you're building something new.
