How to Frame Your Innovative Product So People Understand, Believe In, and Champion It
Written for Harvard Innovation Lab: Branding expert Anne Miltenburg on finding the right ‘frame’ for your venture by listening to your customers and testing your language with real people.
Last year at a conference, I watched almost every founder reach for the same shorthand: We're the X for Y. We're the Uber for lawnmowers. We're like Tinder for dogs.
The phrase has become such a cliché that some speakers visibly cringed when they said it out loud. The audience laughed, everyone acknowledged the joke, and then the pitch carried on.
"The Uber for X" may have become a startup cliché, but I think it was trying to solve a very real problem.
When we're faced with something unfamiliar, we instinctively look for the fastest way to make sense of it. The "Uber for X" shorthand is one attempt to do that. There are many others. In every case, the goal is the same: helping people make sense of something new.
Innovative products ask a lot of their audience. They introduce unfamiliar technology, new behaviors, or entirely new categories. The harder your product is to understand, the more mental effort people have to invest before they can decide whether it's worth their attention.
It’s a noisy world. People have limited attention. If they don't understand something quickly, they move on.
I work as a freelance brand director with innovative technology companies including Flutterwave, MESH, M-KOPA and Internet of Elephants.
On the surface, they have very little in common. Payments. Social networks. Financial services. Wildlife technology.
What they do have in common is that they're all introducing something new. Before customers, investors or journalists can decide whether they care, they first have to make sense of what they're looking at.
One of the ways brand strategists do this is by finding the right ‘frame’ for a product.
A good frame helps people make sense of something new. It gives them a starting point. It reduces the mental effort required to understand what you're building.
Listen to how people are already making sense of your product
Good framing starts with listening.
When MESH, an online business community for entrepreneurs in the informal economy in Africa, was still in its early days, one phrase kept coming up in conversations with users.
They described it as "a community for serious young people."
"Serious" didn't mean formal. It was shorthand for something much richer. These were people trying to build businesses, looking for opportunities, willing to help one another, and tired of spaces where people were only looking for handouts or wasting time.
We didn't invent that language. Our users did. And it helped us grow the user base to hundreds of thousands of users.
As MESH evolved, we started talking to investors and partners.
“A community for serious young people” was confusing them.
What is a community? Is it in person? Is it online? Is it on a third-party platform? Do you own the user relationship? Do you have their data? And who are “serious young people”? How big is that group?
These questions nudged us to reframe MESH. We played around with different phrases in different conversations. The phrase that clearly got people to take notice was: “a professional social network for the informal economy.”
This frame changed the conversation. Investors could understand the platform model. They could see the size of the opportunity – the informal economy makes up 60% of the global workforce.
The CEO could move from answering basic questions about the product, to answering more interesting ones about the opportunities ahead.
The earlier frame wasn't wrong. It reflected what early users valued most. The later frame reflected what a broader audience needed to understand.
Listening didn't give us the final answer. It gave us a place to start.
When the language doesn't exist yet
Listening is where I always start, but some products are so new that your audience has no language for them yet. They can describe the problem they're trying to solve, but not the thing you've built.
That's where framing becomes a creative exercise.
At Internet of Elephants, we built digital experiences designed to help people engage with wildlife in entirely new ways.
One project invited people to explore conservation data by interacting with it. It wasn't a dashboard. It wasn't a game. It wasn't a documentary. There wasn't an obvious category to borrow.
But to pitch it to partners and press, we needed language that described the product itself.
We played around with category frames in the gaming and design space, and eventually called it "a playable data visualization."
We weren't trying to invent jargon. We were trying to combine familiar ideas in a way that helped people understand something genuinely new.
For partners, it worked. For players, we didn't try to explain the technology. We invited them to “play the largest-ever wildlife camera trap study.” It told them what they could do, not what it was.
Listening gave us the starting point. Creativity helped us build the bridge.
Test your frame
Once you've found a frame that feels promising, the work isn't over.
The frame may make perfect sense to you. The real question is whether it makes sense to the people you're trying to reach.
The best way I've found to answer that is to put it in front of real people and see how they make sense of it.
You don't need a finished product to do this. I prefer testing with very simple prototypes: a mock-up landing page, or a fake social media profile with a product name, a short bio and a handful of example posts. Just enough for someone to form a first impression.
Then I ask a few simple questions.
What do you think this product is?
Who do you think it's for? Is it for you?
What problem do you think it solves?
How would you describe it to someone else?
What feels unclear?
I'm not testing whether people like the wording. I'm testing how they interpret it.
Small changes can lead people to completely different conclusions.
I saw this while working on a coding program for women who wanted to build careers in technology. We tested two frames.
Our first frame focused on the social mission. We described it as "a coding program for mothers returning to work." We hypothesized that purpose, community and peer support would be the strongest draw for this audience.
Then we tested a second frame. Instead of focusing on who the program was for, we focused on what it offered: "world-class coding education for a career in tech."
The program hadn't changed. The response had.
Women were far more excited by the second description. They weren't looking for a program that made them feel like a charity case. They wanted a serious pathway into a career in technology.
I saw something similar while speaking to a team at the Harvard Innovation Labs that was developing a tool for neurosurgeons.
The team initially described it as an assistant. To the founders, the word suggested support and efficiency. The surgeons heard something else. To them, an assistant implied they needed help doing a job they had spent years mastering.
The product wasn't the problem. The frame was.
Both examples taught me the same thing. People don't just hear the words you choose. They interpret them through their own experiences, ambitions, and assumptions.
That's why testing a frame isn't about asking people whether they like it; it's about understanding how they relate to it.
If people consistently interpret your product differently from how you intended, that's not a messaging problem. It's an opportunity to refine the frame.
AI is a great brainstorming partner, but a poor substitute for customers
AI has become one of my favorite tools for generating possibilities.
I'll ask it to come up with 10 different ways of describing the same product. To borrow phrases from other categories. To rewrite a landing page for different audiences. It's remarkably good at expanding the range of ideas you consider.
What AI can't tell you is what language your audience is already using, or which frame will resonate with them. It also can't draw on the unexpected connections that come from years of seeing products in completely different industries.
Some of the best framing ideas I've worked on have come from recognizing a pattern in a business that looked, on the surface, completely unrelated.
Only speaking with real people will tell you how they're already making sense of your product.
The most useful workflow I've found is to combine the two: Listen carefully to your customers, use AI to explore different ways of expressing what you've learned, then go back to customers and test again.
TLDR
Innovative products will always ask people to invest a little mental effort before they can understand something new.
You can't remove that effort completely. But you can reduce it.
Listen to how people are already making sense of your product. Craft language that helps them understand it more quickly. Test it, refine it, and keep listening as your company grows.
A good frame won't build your company for you. But if you get it right, it will start doing some of the heavy lifting for you.