In 2008 I was hired as the first marketer at a company selling virtual campus tours to universities. The product worked. Nobody wanted it. It took me most of a year to understand that the problem was not demand, not the product, and not the price. The problem was that a virtual tour was not a thing anyone had a slot for in their head.
Admissions directors had budget lines. Print viewbook. Campus visit day. Travel for recruiters. Photography. There was no line called virtual tour, so buying one required somebody to invent a budget category, defend it internally, and take personal risk on a term nobody in their peer group recognized. We were not competing with another vendor. We were competing with the absence of a shelf.
Name the problem before you name the product. Buyers will fund a problem they already have long before they will fund a product they have never heard of.
The first move was to stop selling virtual tours and start selling the yield problem. Every admissions office knew that students who visited campus enrolled at dramatically higher rates, and every one of them knew most of their applicant pool would never make the trip. That gap was already a line item in their anxiety, if not in their budget. Once we led with the gap, the product became the obvious answer to a question they had been asking themselves for years.
The second move was prestige vocabulary. We needed one recognizable institution to use our words in public, on their own site, in their own voice. One did. Within eighteen months we were fielding inbound from schools describing what they wanted in language we had written, which is the only real evidence that a category is forming.
The third move was patience, and it was by far the hardest. The market takes years to catch up to language you have already established, and the entire time it feels like the message is not landing. We stayed relentlessly boring about the same terms for three years. Then VR arrived, the term went mainstream, and competitors started describing themselves with vocabulary we had been repeating since before anyone was listening.
Seventeen years later I still run this playbook. Name the problem, borrow credibility to say the words out loud, then repeat them well past the point of your own boredom. The naming exercise everyone wants to do at the offsite is the last five percent. The other ninety five is distribution.