Who shapes whom: the environment or the person

A baby does not choose whether it will be cold or warm, fed or hungry. The environment decides its state completely. An adult can open a window, turn up the heating, cook a meal. The adult acts on the environment instead of simply enduring it. The entire path of growing up runs between these two poles, and developmental psychology has a precise name for it: the transition from bottom-up to top-down regulation.

This sounds like a topic for a parenting book. It is also one of the most useful lenses I know for understanding a buyer who has just walked into something unfamiliar. And a company entering the Russian market puts two sets of people into unfamiliar territory at once: its future customers and its own team.

Two directions of regulation

Bottom-up regulation is the state in which the field and the environment define the individual, not the other way round. Reactions form from outside in, from the conditions of the environment to the state of the organism. It dominates early life not because it is the “right” way to be, but because an infant objectively has no other resources. It has nothing to steer the environment with except crying.

Top-down regulation runs the opposite way. The individual influences the environment, manages the container, and gains control as an inner mental model of the world takes shape. Here the environment no longer decides for the person. As the capacity to predict and act grows, the person starts deciding for the environment, or more precisely, inside it.

The key word is model. Top-down control is only possible where you already have a working picture of how things behave. Without that picture, every attempt to steer is a guess, and the organism sensibly falls back on letting the surroundings set the pace.

The transition moves in waves

The move from bottom-up to top-down is not a single jump. It is a smooth, wave-like process. A child is fully at the mercy of the environment, then for a short while finds a first grip on it, then slides back, and this repeats many times, with the balance gradually shifting towards top-down as the child grows.

That wave does not stop at adulthood. It continues on a smaller scale. When a grown person lands in a new and unfamiliar environment, such as a new job, a new city or a new relationship, they move back towards bottom-up for a time, because they have not yet built a mental model of that particular setting. This is not regression in a pathological sense. It is an ordinary part of learning a new context.

For marketing, this is the part that matters most. Your buyer’s level of self-direction is not a fixed trait you can read off a persona sheet. It depends on how familiar the situation is to them right now. The same procurement director who negotiates hard in a category they know may behave like a newcomer in one they do not.

Why Russia keeps buyers closer to bottom-up

Here I will mark clearly what follows as my interpretation of the market, applied through this lens, rather than a clinical finding.

A Western buyer searching on Google usually meets a familiar set of brands, review sites and comparison tools. Their model of the category is mature, so they act top-down: they know what they want, filter fast and resent being guided.

The Russian buying environment has been rebuilt repeatedly in recent years. Brands left, local alternatives appeared, payment routes changed, and many categories now reach the buyer through Yandex, marketplaces such as Ozon and Wildberries, and conversations in Telegram and WhatsApp rather than through a brand’s own site. Each such change resets part of the buyer’s mental model. A person whose map of a category was redrawn last year is, in that category, closer to bottom-up than their Western counterpart. They look for support: a trusted recommendation, a clear explanation, a human who answers in a messenger, a guarantee that makes the choice safe.

A foreign brand arriving in that environment is an additional unknown. The buyer has no model of you at all. So the reasonable expectation is a temporary lean towards bottom-up: more need for something to hold on to, less independent initiative. That is not weak demand or a sign of an unsophisticated market. It is the normal phase that comes before a new model forms.

What local practice requires follows from this. Give the buyer an environment that carries them for a while. Explain the category before you sell into it. Put a reachable person on the page, in the channel where Russians actually talk. Show how delivery, payment, warranty and returns work here, in this country, rather than linking to a global policy page. These are the things that let a bottom-up buyer lean on you, and they are the things a translated Western site almost always lacks. Finding out which of them your particular buyers need is the job of customer research, and it is cheaper done before launch than reverse-engineered from a failed campaign.

When top-down switches on too early

There is a risk hidden in the transition. If a child cannot cope with the environment in the ordinary, natural way, meaning a reliable adult figure does not give them time to build top-down regulation gradually, premature top-down switches on. The child has to survive on their own long before the real capacity for it has matured.

The direct consequence of that early switch is an avoidant attachment style. The logic is simple and harsh: if there is nobody to rely on, any mother becomes potentially dangerous, because trust in outside support was torn out of the process too soon. The child is forced to build a pseudo top-down ahead of schedule, to control what they are physically not ready to control, and that early independence leaves a mark for decades.

The adult who cannot ask for help

The classic picture: a successful, competent adult who runs complex processes at work, yet flatly cannot ask for help even with small things. Carrying a bag, splitting a task, admitting they are not coping. From the outside it looks like pride or excessive independence.

Often it is frozen premature top-down. Early in life this person had to start “managing the environment themselves” too soon, because there was no reliable bottom-up support to count on. For such a psyche, asking for help equals a return to dangerous dependence, back to the place where the environment once failed them.

You will meet this person on both sides of a deal. As a buyer, they will not ask your sales team the questions that would let them choose well. They research silently, distrust anything that looks like pressure, and disappear rather than say “I don’t understand this”. Urgency tactics push them away, because being hurried into dependence is exactly what they defend against. What reaches them is a slow record of reliability and a way to test you on their own terms, without committing and without having to ask.

As a client of an agency or a local partner, the same person runs the Russian launch from headquarters, refuses to delegate, and treats every local recommendation as a loss of control. I do not say this as a criticism of anyone. It is a pattern worth recognising, because the helpful response is not to wrest control away by force.

What this changes in practice

Understanding the two directions of regulation gives a concrete reference point, for yourself and for the people you manage. If someone, a child, an employee or a partner, finds themselves in an unfamiliar environment, expect a temporary slide back to bottom-up: more need for support, less independent initiative. Do not read it as a flaw of character. It is the normal phase before a new mental model forms.

On the other hand, if an adult shows excessive, anxious top-down behaviour, such as rigid control, an inability to delegate or a fear of relying on anyone, it helps to see a history behind it rather than a temperament. Somewhere, top-down had to switch on before the psyche was ready. Help in that situation means giving them, slowly and through accumulated experience of reliability, the feeling that bottom-up is safe again, that it is fine to lean on the environment at least sometimes instead of only steering it.

For a company selling into Russia from abroad, I would turn this into three working rules.

First, assume your buyers are closer to bottom-up than at home, and build the support they will lean on: local proof, local terms, a person who answers.

Second, assume your own team is in bottom-up too. It has no mental model of Yandex auctions, Russian search intent or messenger-first sales yet, whatever its experience with Google. The fastest way through that phase is to lean on people who already have the model, while your team builds its own. A structured Russian market entry is essentially that: borrowed top-down for the months when you do not have your own.

Third, watch for premature top-down in yourself. The launch plan copied from the home market and defended against every local objection is often an attempt to stay in control of an environment you have not yet learned to read.

A wave that never ends

Bottom-up and top-down are not stages you pass through once and for all. They are two modes the psyche moves between throughout life, every time it meets something unfamiliar. The difference between mature and immature regulation is not that the mature one controls the environment completely. The mature psyche knows how to return to bottom-up in time, to trust and to accept support, without counting that as a defeat of the top-down it once built with such effort.

Markets work the same way. The companies that do well in an unfamiliar country are rarely the ones that arrive in full control. They are the ones that allow themselves, and their buyers, a period of leaning on the environment before they start to shape it.

Frequently asked questions

Sources

• Russian version of this article on belokrylovo.ru: Кто кем управляет: среда человеком или человек средой