Six weeks into her new job running Pittsburgh’s airport, Christina Cassotis told a room full of local tech leaders that she wanted to drive a stake into the heart of the hub. She remembers an audible gasp.

The hub she was talking about had already been gone for 11 years. US Airways walked away from Pittsburgh in 2004. Everyone in that room knew it. What made them flinch was hearing someone say it out loud.

We hear a less dramatic version of that gasp on client calls. It happens the moment we suggest that a service name has to change, and the answer comes back fast: this is what we call it, this is what all of our documentation calls it. If you run a professional services firm or a manufacturer that sells capability instead of part numbers, you have probably said some version of that sentence. It’s usually true. That’s exactly what makes it hard.

Table of Contents

• The building was right for 12 years and stayed for 21 more
• Your service names came from inside the building
• What it costs when your language only works inside the building
• Say who you are not for
• This does not stop at the website

The building was right for 12 years and stayed for 21 more

Pittsburgh International was engineered correctly for a connecting hub, and it went on operating as one for 21 years after the hub was gone. That distinction matters, because the failure here was persistence.

The terminal opened on October 1, 1992, purpose-built for US Airways. Into 2001, roughly 80% of its traffic was connecting passengers, people who never left the airside terminal. The famous X-shaped concourse existed to move those people between gates quickly. So did the eight miles of baggage conveyor and the underground tram that carried travelers half a mile between terminals for about $4.5 million a year.

Every one of those decisions was sound. For a hub moving something like 20 million passengers a year, that is what the building needed to be.

Then US Airways filed for bankruptcy twice and abandoned the Pittsburgh hub in 2004. Allegheny County was left holding $600 million in bonds it had expected the airline to repay. Traffic slid to around 8 million passengers by the mid-2010s, and almost all of those people were starting or finishing a trip in Pittsburgh rather than passing through.

The building kept running the hub playbook anyway. Same X. Same eight miles of belt. Same tram.

The bar shows two separate delays. The airport went 11 years before anyone in charge said the hub was finished. Then it went another 10 before the building agreed. Cassotis arrived in January 2015 and, by her own account, had to drive a stake into the heart of the hub before anything else could happen.

The replacement terminal is designed around the customer the airport actually has. Today 98% of PIT passengers begin or end their journey in Pittsburgh and 2% connect. Richard Belotti, the authority’s former planning vice president, put the old situation plainly: “We were left with a building that wasn’t the right fit for Pittsburgh anymore.”

Your service names came from inside the building

Most service names on a company website were written to satisfy the people who already work there. They come out of internal documentation, or out of the department that happens to deliver the work, or out of a founder who needed a label one afternoon in 2011 and picked a good one.

Products are easier. A product has a model number, a spec sheet, and buyers who search for it by name. Services get named by committee and then inherited. Nobody revisits the decision, because nothing forces the question.

Two patterns account for most of what we run into. The first is the legacy catalog name, language carried forward from old print materials or from an internal division that has since been reorganized. The second is insider jargon: terminology that is precise, technically correct, and completely absent from the way a buyer describes the same need.

The objection is usually right, which is the problem

When we propose a change, the pushback almost always comes from the owner or founder, and it comes in three forms. They coined the name, so changing it lands as a verdict on their judgment. They worry the plain-language version misstates the work. And they don’t want to confuse the customers who already use the old vocabulary.

The middle objection deserves respect, because it’s frequently accurate. The internal name often is the more precise one. A firm that says “litigation support services” may well be describing something narrower and more exact than whatever a plain-language rewrite would produce.

Here is the useful comparison. When the Allegheny County Airport Authority scrapped the underground tram, Paul Hoback explained the decision in one sentence: “The train made sense in 1992 when the airport was a hub.” The tram worked. It was well built and it did its job. It was also correct about a condition that had expired 20 years earlier.

Accuracy and audience are two different tests. A service name can pass the first and fail the second, and when that happens the name is doing damage while everyone inside the company can see that it’s true.

What it costs when your language only works inside the building

A name that only makes sense internally takes you out of consideration before anyone speaks to you. The screening happens in a part of the buying process you never see, and it happens fast.

You are being evaluated while nobody is talking to you

Forrester’s 2025 B2B buying research found that buyers complete most of their evaluation before they ever contact a vendor, and roughly 80% of buyers initiate that first contact only after they are about 70% of the way through. Gartner puts it differently: buyers spend only about 17% of a purchase meeting with suppliers, and with several in play, that can fall to 5% each.

So the shortlist gets built from reading. Somebody scans your services page, decides whether you do the thing they need, and moves on. If your categories are named for your internal divisions, that reader has to translate before they can evaluate, and buyers who are most of the way through a decision generally will not bother. A manufacturer whose capabilities are filed under a legacy program name gets skipped by a procurement team that never learns those capabilities exist.

AI assistants have the same problem, with less patience

Buyers increasingly ask an AI assistant to name candidates before they open a single website. To put your company in that answer, the model needs published content that states who a service is for, why someone would choose it, and how it differs from the obvious alternatives. Internal names give it almost nothing to work with.

A page that describes your work in vocabulary only your staff uses cannot be matched to a question asked in the vocabulary your buyer uses.

The airport’s version of this bill is easier to total up: $600 million in bonds tied to an airline that had left, eight miles of conveyor maintained for connections that had stopped happening, and $4.5 million a year to run a train half a mile.

Say who you are not for

Naming the buyer you aren’t built for makes the right buyer trust everything else on the page. This is the part most companies refuse, and the airport is a useful argument for doing it.

Pittsburgh could have chased its old numbers. It handled about 20 million passengers in the late 1990s and it serves under 10 million now. The new terminal was sized for 13 to 15 million, which is honest growth from 9.85 million rather than a bet on becoming a hub again. Belotti described the goal as right-sizing the airport, and right-sizing meant subtraction: the tram gone, the baggage system cut from eight miles of belt to three, delivery times roughly halved.

An airport that says clearly what it is ends up easier to use. The same holds for a services page.

The fourth question is the one that gets cut. Naming the project size you handle badly, the industry you have no business in, or the situation where a smaller shop would serve someone better feels like handing away revenue.

Our experience runs the other way. The inquiries that arrive after you have been specific about fit are better inquiries, because the people sending them have already screened themselves. Volume matters less than whether the sales conversation starts from a shared understanding of the work.

This does not stop at the website

A naming decision that only changes the website leaves the same problem everywhere else. Pittsburgh did not stop at the sign over the door.

The authority changed the word in 2015 and then changed nearly everything the word had produced: the terminal, the baggage system, four miles of new roadway connecting the site to Interstate 376, the concessions program, and the art. Over 80% of the art and cultural installations came from local artists and artisans. The roofline was shaped after the region’s rolling hills and 38 tree-like columns after Western Pennsylvania forests, no two of them alike. Local operators like Mineo’s Pizza and Marathon Diner took space alongside the national brands.

Your version of that list is longer than a sitemap. The proposal template uses the old service names. So does the trade show booth, the capability deck, the line the receptionist says when she answers the phone, and the internal documentation that started all of this. Renaming a page while every other surface keeps the old vocabulary produces a company that contradicts itself in public.

This is why we argue that naming belongs in strategy rather than in copywriting, and why it has to be settled before the literal redesign begins. A redesign is usually where the problem surfaces, since building a new sitemap forces someone to defend every label out loud. It is not where the problem ends.

Cassotis got 10 years, a public budget, and a hard deadline. Most companies get none of those, which means the work has to be sequenced instead of staged as one dramatic reveal. Start with the words. The words are cheap, and every other surface inherits them.

Find out what your names are costing you

Blue Archer has spent 27 years arguing about service names with people who had good reasons for the ones they had. That argument is usually the most valuable part of a project, and it comes before anyone opens a design file.

If your service categories are older than your current strategy, we can walk through what they look like to someone who has never worked at your company. Start with our digital strategy work, or tell us about the project through the project planner.