Why some images land instantly and others need explaining

A small child looks at the sea and does not see water in one place, a horizon in another, a gull above the waves. They see one impression, loud and whole. An adult in the same spot takes the picture apart into elements almost automatically: water, the line of the horizon, a bird, wind. Between those two ways of looking lies the whole road that metaphor travels as a mind develops.

That road explains something practical. Some images feel ancient and bodily, and they work on anyone who sees them. Others are clearly cultural additions laid on top, and they work only on people who share the culture. A company selling into a market it did not grow up in spends a surprising amount of money on the second kind while believing it bought the first.

Where the mind gets its domains

The psyche reflects the environment through the body. There is the structure of the body itself: a skeleton, organs, functional systems. And there is the imprint of the outside world, which settles through repeated experience into stable domains. A domain is not a single impression. It is the result of accumulation: a similar impression lived through many times settles into a whole region of meaning, and later images are drawn from it.

This leads somewhere unexpected about the figures of early childhood. The significant early figures are already metaphors rather than physical people in full. The psyche does not hold a person in their entirety, it holds an image assembled out of repeated impressions of them. That image is then used as building material for metaphors in completely different contexts, with no remaining connection to the original person.

So when an audience receives an image, the receiving apparatus is not a dictionary. It is a set of domains built out of repetition. Whatever has not been repeated enough times in that particular life is not there to be drawn on.

The road from the whole to the parts

The development of metaphorical thinking does not run from simple to complex in the usual sense. It runs from the concretely large to the abstractly large. The domain does not narrow along the way. If anything it widens: the more abstract the image, the broader the area it is applied to and the less precise the hit becomes.

What changes is something else, how far the picture is broken up. A child and an archaic culture think in domains that are at once very concrete and very wide, without singling out parts inside them. A phenomenon is lived as one undivided picture: the ocean, the sky and the bird above it are one impression rather than three objects. This kind of perception is called whole, or archaic. It is not worse than the adult kind. It is built differently, and it does not cut the world into pieces in advance.

The adult Western mind splits any picture into elements almost reflexively, the moment it appears. That is a learned skill rather than a natural given, automated so thoroughly that it feels innate. It is also why inner quiet is a rare and valuable experience: it is the moment when the habitual taking apart switches off for a while and the picture becomes whole again, as it was in early childhood.

The evolution of metaphorical thinking moved through concrete historical forms. Homeopathic magic worked on the principle of like affecting like: objects similar in structure were thought of as one entity, so acting on an image was felt as acting on the original. Contagious magic worked associatively instead: one thing pointed to another through adjacency and the context they once shared, rather than through resemblance. Later came topological metaphors, images built on the most basic spatial forms, the closed and the open, a cavity and a protrusion. They encoded deep symbolic oppositions long before there were words for them.

Against that background the difference between metaphor and metonymy becomes visible. A metaphor is a structural transfer, a whole image. A metonymy is an association inside one context, where a characteristic detail stands in for the whole simply because experience placed it nearby, and not because of any structural similarity.

That distinction is the one that breaks at a border. Structural transfer survives translation, because the structure is still there in the new language. Association does not, because the context that made two things adjacent belongs to one culture and does not exist in the other.

Why one image lands and another needs a footnote

This picture explains why some images arrive instantly and at the level of the body, while others have to be spelled out. Images rooted in the archaic, whole layer, natural elements and simple spatial forms, work directly, bypassing conscious explanation. They do not need to be understood, it is enough to live through them. Images of later, cultural origin need context, because they are assembled out of the layers of a specific culture and period rather than out of primary bodily experience.

This is worth keeping in mind when choosing an image for yourself or for a conversation with another person at a difficult moment. The metaphor of a river, a road, a tree, of heaviness and lightness, works almost always and with almost anyone: it addresses the archaic layer common to all people regardless of culture. The metaphor of a particular cultural artefact, an office chair, a specific brand, a current media figure, works selectively and requires the other person to share the same cultural code. Otherwise it stays as words with no resonance.

What changes when the audience is Russian

A foreign company entering Russia carries two things across the border: a product and an accumulated cultural layer. The product arrives. The layer does not.

At home that layer was paid for over years. Campaigns, press, sponsorships and ordinary word of mouth built a shared code, and an image that nods to it lands because the audience has repeated the reference enough times for it to become a domain. In Russia the same brand is usually new, and the references it leans on were built by other brands, other decades and another set of shared experiences. Agency briefs treat this as a translation problem. It is a domain problem, and translation cannot fix it, because the missing thing is repetition inside the audience rather than accuracy in the wording.

The mechanics of the local platforms make the gap harder to paper over. In Google Ads at home, a brand with recognition can afford an oblique headline, because the viewer completes it from memory. Yandex Direct gives a newcomer short headlines and short texts, and no room for the paragraph of setup a cultural reference silently needs. In the Yandex Ad Network your image appears beside content the person actually came for, so it gets a fraction of a second of attention. An image from the archaic layer survives that fraction of a second. An image that first has to be decoded does not.

The same asymmetry runs through the social platforms. Advertising on VK and Telegram puts your message inside a feed or a channel where the surrounding material is entirely native, produced by people who share every reference with the reader. A borrowed cultural image next to that reads as foreign in the plainest sense, and foreignness in a feed is read as irrelevance before it is read as anything else.

There is a further local wrinkle that catches Western creative teams. Russian commercial communication has its own settled codes for seriousness, warmth and authority, built out of local history rather than global advertising conventions. Humour that signals confidence in one market can read as a lack of seriousness in another, and the company never finds out, because nobody writes in to explain why they were unconvinced. You see a weaker response and no reason for it.

The practical consequence for a company selling into Russia from elsewhere is an order of operations. Build the core of the message on the archaic layer, on bodily and spatial experience the audience already carries: weight, distance, a road, load and relief, the closed and the open. Use that for the parts of the communication that have to work on strangers, which is most of the advertising. Keep cultural references for the places where you can afford setup: long-form content, a case study, an article, the parts of the site a person reaches after deciding you are worth the time. And let the cultural layer be built rather than assumed, which is exactly what accumulating recognisable local history means. Deciding which images your audience already holds is customer research before it is creative work, and the ordering of the two is the difference between a message that lands and one that merely gets served, which is why advertising in Russia fails more often on imagery than on settings.

A test before the creative is signed off

Five questions worth asking of every image in the campaign:

1. Which layer is this? If the image is an element of nature or a basic spatial form, it belongs to the archaic layer and travels. If it is an artefact of a specific culture, it belongs to the later layer and does not.
2. Is this transfer or association? A structural resemblance survives translation. A detail that stands for the whole because it happened to sit next to it in your home context stays behind at the border.
3. How much setup does it need? Count the words required before the image makes sense. If the answer is more than the format holds, the format will win.
4. Who repeated this often enough? A reference works because the audience has lived through it many times. Name where that repetition happened in a Russian life.
5. What is left if the reference fails? If removing the cultural nod empties the message, the message was resting on something you do not own here.

Splitting the world into neat, named parts is a history the psyche went through rather than a law of perception, and the habit stuck. Underneath it a more ancient layer is still there: the ability to see the ocean, the sky and the bird as one. Knowing which of the two layers you are addressing decides whether an audience feels your message or decodes it, and only one of those makes a sale.

Frequently asked questions

Sources

• Russian version of this article on belokrylovo.ru: Как психика училась дробить целое на части