Removing the brand name from the answer won the box

Removing the brand name from the answer won the box
08:40 UTC — Confirmed by a product marketer, counterintuitive one. Their answer paragraph for a generic "what is X" query kept name-dropping their own product in the lift zone. A neutral competitor answer held the snippet.
— They rewrote the liftable paragraph to define the concept generically, brand-free
— Snippet captured in ~9 days
— +1,700 sessions/month, and the brand mention moved one paragraph down where it still converts
Why it matters: Reportedly Google avoids lifting promotional, self-referential passages for definitional queries — it wants the neutral answer. Sell below the lift zone, define inside it. Greedy paragraphs lose boxes. Watching this.