From "life" to "this second": the abstraction ladder

Say the word “life” and you have said something so large that it will hold any meaning anyone cares to put into it. Say “my life”, and it is a little narrower. Say “this particular second of my life, right now”, and almost nothing of the old vastness is left: what remains is close to a bare fact. The same word has travelled from a boundless metaphor to something near a concept, and you can trace that path for any image at all.

This article is about that path, and about why it matters for anyone who writes to Russian buyers or tries to find out what they want. The idea comes from the theory of metaphor, but its practical use is very plain. Every message sits somewhere on a ladder of abstraction. Where it sits decides what the listener can do with it.

What semantic primitives are

At the top of the ladder lies the layer that looks least like a real statement. These are the broadest words we have, almost empty of content. Semantic primitives and iconic images are the least conceptualised level of description. They include logical operators, the simplest functions and the basic questions: what, who, where, when, how many, how, what for, why. This is the minimal kit from which any statement is built. On its own it carries almost nothing specific. “What” is empty until something is put into it.

At this level a metaphor is as abstract and as wide as it can be. As specifics are added, it gradually loses its metaphorical properties. Take the chain: not “life” but “my life”; not “my life” but “this day”; not “this day” but “this very second”. At the far end of the scale the word turns into a concept: a finished, sharply outlined unit of meaning, tied to a particular moment and context.

What the ladder explains about speech

This structure explains why some phrases sound grand and foggy while others sound precise and grounded, even when they formally describe the same thing.

“Life” as an ultimate metaphor has no borders. You can pour into it hope, fear, the meaning of existence, anything at all, because nothing specific fills it yet. “My life” is already an orientation: a subject has appeared, and the domain has narrowed while staying fairly wide. “A particular second of life” is almost a concept. The event has boundaries in time and space, and most of the room for interpretation has gone.

The wider the word, the more people recognise themselves in it. The narrower the word, the more accurately it hits. You cannot have both at once, and that trade-off runs through all marketing communication.

Where brand copy sits, and why translation makes it worse

Look at a typical brand slogan and you will usually find it near the top of the ladder: life, future, possibility, freedom, better, more. That is a deliberate choice. A wide word lets every reader fill it with their own meaning, so nobody feels excluded.

The cost is precision. A reader who puts their own meaning into “a better future” has learned nothing about the product. The phrase is agreeable and weightless.

For a company entering Russia from abroad this problem usually gets sharper, and for a predictable reason. The Russian texts are most often translated from an English original. An English slogan built on wide words can carry some warmth at home, because the audience is used to that register. Moved into Russian word for word, the same line tends to sound like the empty language of a corporate brochure. It is grammatically correct and says nothing a reader can check. This is my interpretation from working with such texts, not a measured result, but anyone can test it: read your translated homepage aloud to a Russian speaker and ask what exactly you promised.

The fix is rarely a better translation of the same wide words. It is a move down the ladder. A claim becomes stronger in Russian when it acquires a city, a deadline, a price in rubles, a legal entity that signs the contract, a named situation in which the product is used. Each of these is a rung lower. Each takes away some of the room for interpretation and gives back something the buyer can verify.

The ladder in search: Yandex versus Google

Search advertising shows the ladder in its purest form, because the buyer writes their own position on it into the search box.

A short generic query sits high. It is wide, many people type it, and it tells you little about what any one of them needs. A long query with a product type, a city and a condition sits low. Few people type it, and almost everyone who does is close to a decision. Seen this way, keyword research is simply a map of where your buyers stand on the ladder.

The mechanics differ from Google in ways that matter here. Russian is a heavily inflected language: one word appears in many grammatical forms, and Yandex’s own tools, Wordstat for query volumes and the matching logic of Yandex Direct, are built around that. A keyword list translated from an English campaign will usually miss the concrete, low-rung phrasings real Russian buyers use, because those phrasings did not exist in the source language. The work has to start from Russian queries, not from translated ones.

The ad itself has to answer on the same rung as the query. Yandex Direct gives you little space for a headline and text, so there is no room for wide words that carry nothing. A wide query can be met with a broader promise. A narrow query needs a narrow answer: the exact product, the city, the term, the price if you can show it. An ad that answers a specific question with “solutions for your business” has climbed to the top of the ladder at the moment the buyer came down to the bottom.

The ladder as a diagnostic tool in customer interviews

The scale also works as a way of diagnosing a conversation. This is where it earns its keep in research.

When a person talks about their difficulties in the widest primitives, “everything is bad”, “nothing works”, “this is no way to live”, they are standing at the top, most metaphorical level. There the domain of identification is huge and the accuracy is almost nil. Working with that level directly is useless. You cannot solve “everything is bad”, because literally everything fits into that “everything”.

The task is to move the conversation down the ladder step by step. From “everything is bad” to “what exactly is bad”. From “what exactly” to “when exactly it went bad”. Keep going until the abstraction has narrowed to a specific case that can be dealt with.

Customer interviews in Russia run into this constantly. A buyer asked about a supplier or a service will readily answer with a wide word: fine, normal, so-so, expensive. Those answers are true and useless. Arguing with the scale of the statement is pointless. Proving to someone that “not everything is bad” goes nowhere. It is far more productive to ask something very concrete: what happened the last time you placed an order, what exactly went wrong that week, what did you do next. The conversation then slides down by itself, to a near-concept where there is already something to work with.

The same move helps with a foreign management team briefing an agency. “We want to grow in Russia” is the top rung. “We want more orders” is one below. “We want distributors in two regions to reorder within a quarter” is close to a concept. Only the last one can be turned into a plan with channels, a budget and a check at the end.

Moving up when the details bury the pattern

The ladder works in both directions, and the reverse move is just as useful.

Sometimes a conversation gets stuck in small details with no overall picture. A person lists separate events and cannot see what connects them. A sales team brings twenty separate complaints from twenty clients. Then it helps to move up, towards broader primitives, so that a common pattern becomes visible behind the separate episodes. What do these complaints have in common? Why do they happen? What for is the client really buying?

If you only ever dig through the details of one particular day and never raise your eyes to a wider level, it is easy to lose the overall meaning of what is going on. You stop seeing the forest for the trees. A company that answers every Russian complaint one by one, and never asks what the complaints share, will keep patching the same hole.

The same move in your own head

The technique also works in a dialogue with yourself. The thought “everything in my Russian business is wrong” sits at the upper, extremely metaphorical level. Nothing can be solved there, precisely because the domain is too wide.

It helps to step down on purpose. Not “the business” but “this month”. Not “this month” but “the meeting with the distributor on Tuesday”. The lower you go, the smaller the space becomes. The hit gets more accurate, though, and the chance of finding at least some way forward becomes real.

What to do if you sell into Russia from abroad

A short route through your own materials:

1. Mark the rung of every key message. Take the homepage headline, the three main claims and the ad texts. For each one, ask whether a Russian buyer could check it. If not, it sits at the top.
2. Move translated claims down, not sideways. Replace a better translation of a wide word with a specific: city, delivery term, price, contract terms, a named use case.
3. Build keyword lists from Russian queries. Start from what people type into Yandex, and match each group of queries with an ad on the same rung.
4. Question customers about events, not opinions. Ask about the last specific purchase, not about attitudes in general.
5. Step up when you drown in cases. Once a month, gather the collected details and ask what connects them.

The skill here is not choosing one pole. It is moving along the line on purpose, in whichever direction the task needs. Getting stuck in foggy generalisations means nothing can be solved. Getting stuck in particulars means the overall picture disappears. Most foreign brands in Russia are stuck at the first pole, and the way out is usually a few rungs down.

Frequently asked questions

Sources

• Russian version of this article on belokrylovo.ru: От «жизни» до «этой секунды»: шкала абстракции