Why the debate about consciousness slows marketers down

People have asked “what is consciousness?” for thousands of years, and there is still no shared answer. Plato, medieval monks and modern neuroscientists each described it in their own way, and no description has won. Your desk holds a different problem: a customer puts a product in the basket and leaves without paying. The grand debate will not help you with that. Things you can measure will.

This article is about avoiding elegant philosophy when your job is to change what buyers and teams actually do, and about why the honest move is to set the deepest question aside rather than pretend you have answered it. For a company selling into Russia from abroad, the temptation to explain everything through “the Russian mindset” is strong, and it leads nowhere.

Why “what is consciousness” does not help you sell

Picture a planning meeting. Sales fell 15% over the quarter, and someone says: “The problem is that we don’t understand our customer’s consciousness.” It sounds clever. Everyone nods. And then? What single action could anyone take before lunch tomorrow on the strength of that sentence?

None. Each person in the room holds a different meaning for the word: the customer’s thoughts, their feelings, some deep essence of personality. By the time the room agrees on what it is talking about, the quarter is over and the sales figure has not moved.

The topic is too large and too contested to build a working tool on. A tool needs precision, and a philosophical question cannot supply it by its nature. That is fine: it exists for a different purpose.

A marketer’s decisions are due today. Launch the campaign or wait. Change the headline or keep it. Raise the price by 300 rubles or lose your nerve. Each is checked by money a week later, and none improves because you spent a month reading about the nature of the mind.

International teams have their own version of this trap: a slide on “Russian consumer psychology” full of generalisations about trust and suspicion of foreign brands. Some of it may even be true. None of it tells you which screen of your Russian checkout is losing people.

What you can measure instead

Everything you actually need from a customer can be observed and counted. You do not have to get inside anyone’s head. It is enough to watch what is visible from outside.

Behaviour is visible directly. A person pressed the button or closed the tab. Reached payment or dropped out at the card details step. Came back a week later or vanished. These are facts, not guesses.

Perception is tested through reaction. Show two ad headlines and compare click-through rates. You are watching what people do while they believe nobody is studying them.

Attention is measured in time and accuracy: seconds on the first screen, whether the price was noticed. A click map shows this without a word about philosophy.

Memory is tested through recognition. A couple of days after a campaign, ask a sample of people which brands in the category they remember. Whoever comes up first has won the race for a place in the mind. That is what brand work amounts to: a measurable probability of being recalled at the right moment, rather than an abstract “image in the consumer’s consciousness”.

Emotion is read through markers: the words a person chooses in a review, whether they finished reading or gave up halfway, and physical reactions if you run full-scale testing. All of it leaves traces, and traces can be collected.

Take one word, «дорого», “too expensive”. A practitioner knows it is rarely about the price: usually the buyer did not see what they are paying for. One test settles it. Keep the price and show more clearly what the service includes. If the objection becomes less frequent, the issue was unclear value, not the sum. No theory of mind, only before and after.

None of this is shallower than talk about the mind, and you can work with it. For an owner, each such step costs a definite amount and returns a definite answer instead of another argument at the next meeting.

Where the Russian toolset differs from the Western one

For a foreign company, the measurable approach runs into a local detail: the instruments are different. In Western markets teams usually reach for Google Analytics plus a separate session recording or heatmap service. In Russia the default is Yandex Metrica, which puts session recordings (Webvisor), click and scroll maps, goals and funnels in one free product. Russian search and advertising traffic largely comes through Yandex, so behaviour data and traffic data live in one ecosystem.

There is also a legal side. Russian personal data law requires data on Russian citizens to be stored in databases located in Russia. Before you connect a familiar Western tracking stack to a Russian site, check with a lawyer what it collects and where it sends it.

The third difference is where behaviour happens. A Russian buyer often leaves the site to ask a question in Telegram or calls instead of filling in a form. If you measure only form submissions, you draw conclusions from part of the path. Track calls and messenger clicks as goals from day one.

“But there is still consciousness behind behaviour”

This is the most common objection: everything listed above is only the outward expression, and without the consciousness inside you understand nothing properly.

Logically it is hard to fault. Practically it is a dead end.

Tell a surgeon they may not operate until philosophers agree on what life is. The surgeon will go and save the patient anyway, knowing how to stop bleeding without a final answer about the nature of life.

With a buyer, I can hold no opinion about the depths of their personality. It is enough to see how a specific chain works. A person arrives at the site with a pain: servicing the car at the dealer costs too much. They see a headline about honest prices with no mark-ups. They stay. They read. They leave a request. I have described the path from contact to action and can influence it without looking into anyone’s soul.

If a model predicts behaviour and lets you steer it, the model works. For someone with a sales plan, that is the only test that counts.

Why this is not a retreat from depth

The point is the order of priorities. First comes what you can work with. Later, if curiosity remains, comes what you can discuss forever.

Consciousness is a worthy subject. For someone who launches a campaign tomorrow and answers for the budget, though, it is more honest to set the question aside, possibly for good, and take what a tool gives right now.

Physics has the same story with gravity. Nobody fully knows what it is, yet we described how it behaves and built bridges and satellites. You can run effective campaigns without a theory of everything about the human mind.

What goes into the work instead of big words

A marketer deals with a clear set of things every day, and every one of them is observable and testable.

• Behaviour: how a person acts, where they click, where they give up.
• Perception: how they read the difference between you and a competitor in the first seconds.
• Attention: where their eyes go and where interest fades.
• Memory: what remains of you a week after contact.
• Emotion: the state they are in when they read your message, and what the message does to it.
• Decision: the moment “maybe” turns into “I’ll take it”.

Each of these breaks down into simple movements: a contrast that catches the eye, a threshold such as a long registration or an unclear price, attention split between you and ten other tabs. You need no new vocabulary, only real actions of real people.

This is also the easiest language for setting up targeted advertising. In Russia, where Meta platforms are unavailable to most advertisers, that means VK Ads and Telegram Ads, and you aim at a specific behaviour you have already seen in the numbers instead of an abstract audience.

What it looks like in a live task

Take an example. A company sells a subscription service. People arrive, look at the plans and leave. The philosophical approach would say: understand the customer’s consciousness, their values, their deep motivation. Elegant and useless.

The working approach looks at the evidence. Session recordings show that visitors reach the pricing page and leave after about 8 seconds on average. The click map shows the eye catching on the largest figure, the annual plan. The visitor does not read further to see that this is the price for a whole year, and takes fright. The threshold fired before they understood the benefit.

What to do: bring the monthly price forward in large type and move the annual price lower as “cheaper this way”. After a week, check the conversion rate. If it rose, the guess was right. If not, try the next one. For a foreign company pricing in rubles for the first time, this step matters twice over, because a figure that looks modest in euros or dollars can look very different once converted and shown as the headline number.

The same method helps with staff. A manager says an employee is burning out because of their inner state. A practitioner looks at facts: over the last month the person started answering chats more slowly, stopped proposing ideas at meetings, and takes more sick days on Mondays. These signs show the problem before a resignation letter arrives, and the conversation can be about the workload visible in the calendar.

Notice that the word “consciousness” did not appear once in this work. Seconds, clicks, thresholds and a conversion rate did. If you want to take your own Russian funnel apart with the same logic, a free review is where that starts.

First fix the screen where you lose people. Later, when the funnel is healthy, read about the nature of the mind as much as you like. Trouble begins when the big question is put ahead of revenue and used as cover for not working. Nobody has been paid for a clever phrase at a planning meeting, while a clear button that people finally start pressing pays every day.

The philosopher asks what the buyer’s mind is. The practitioner asks on which screen the buyer got scared and how to remove that fear. The first question is more beautiful. The second one pays the bills.

Frequently asked questions

Sources

• Russian version of this article on belokrylovo.ru: Почему спор о сознании тормозит маркетолога