Eight stages of customer maturity in a market

One person grabs the first item that comes to hand in an unfamiliar category, simply because something has to be bought, and afterwards cannot explain why that one. Another has spent years building a private set of criteria, departs calmly from fashion and from whatever the market calls correct, and explains the choice in two sentences without needing anyone’s approval.

Between those two people there is no difference of character. They stand at different points on one line of development, and every buyer and every market moves along it.

The eight stages every customer passes through

The development of a customer and of a market runs through eight stages, and this is a literal repetition of the logic by which a child’s psyche develops rather than a metaphor.

1. Anxiety. The person meets the category for the first time and buys at random, to close a need they cannot yet describe.
2. Properties and a basic verdict. The object acquires qualities: good or bad, does this relate to me, am I better off or worse off for it.
3. Differentiation of feeling. An attitude towards the object appears, together with a depressive self, a sense of being subject to circumstance. What matters here is that a self is now present at all.
4. The manic self. Criteria arrive, along with “I can” and “I cannot”, power and choice. This is the same psychological knot as the crisis of the third year, when a child first says no to a parent.
5. Family roles. Mother, father, child, with gender now recognised plainly rather than in a blur.
6. Collective roles. The move from the family to a wider community, an expanded repertoire of roles and an awareness of it.
7. Individuality. The right to one’s own criteria, adolescent revolt, the first experiments with leading rather than following.
8. Freedom of choice. The ability to respond differently in different circumstances without falling apart. Private rules. An individual selfishness that is legalised and carries no guilt.

Three things grow at once as a person climbs this staircase: the detail of perception, voluntary control over one’s own reaction, and autonomy from outside judgement. A buyer near the bottom sees a category as a single undivided blur and reacts to it the way the situation pushes them. A buyer near the top sees distinctions invisible to everyone else, chooses the reaction, and does not need the market to confirm that the choice was allowed.

Markets climb the same staircase as people

This trajectory belongs to whole markets as much as to individuals. Recall how mobile telephony or online education looked in their first years: the purchase was anxious and accidental, made without criteria, because people were trying anything at all to close a need that had just appeared. Years later the same market contains buyers for whom the choice of an operator or a study programme is a matter of a fine, personal, long-established system of criteria. They change supplier easily and without drama, guided only by their own logic.

The reverse process is just as telling. A customer in a depleted, deficient state slides back down the same staircase. Not necessarily to the bottom step, but one or two steps back from their usual position. Someone who chose thoughtfully and by personal criteria for years will suddenly grab the nearest option under heavy stress, because anxiety has returned them to an earlier stage where there were no criteria yet, only a need to close something incomprehensible here and now.

Why the stage is national, and what that does to a foreign brand

Here is the part that costs foreign companies the most: the stage a category occupies is not a global property. It is local, and the Russian reading of it rarely matches the one you arrived with.

Categories do not enter every country in the same decade or move at the same speed. Some arrived in Russia late and climbed quickly, because comparison here is easy and the habit of comparing formed fast. Others barely started, and the audience is still at the anxious first contact. My reading, and I mark it as interpretation rather than measurement, is that the mismatch runs in both directions equally often. The confident assumption that Russia is simply a few years behind your home market produces the same broken message as the assumption that it is identical.

What that looks like in practice is a translated page that talks down to its reader. The English original was written for an audience at the seventh stage, which wants room for its own judgement, and the Russian version explains what the product category is, because someone assumed a newer market. Or the opposite: a page written for a mature audience is dropped into a category that only opened here, and it speaks the language of fine distinctions to people who are still anxious about the basic mechanics.

The material for reading the actual stage is already in front of you and costs nothing to collect. The wording of Russian search queries shows whether people are still asking what a thing is and how to choose one, or already comparing named options against each other. Review texts show whether the writer has criteria or only an impression. In Russia a large share of qualified contact happens in messengers rather than by email, so a real transcript of how buyers reason exists and can simply be read. Session recordings show which comparison a visitor tried to make on your page and abandoned. None of this needs a research budget. It needs someone to look at it as evidence about a stage rather than as a list of complaints, which is most of what customer research for a new market actually consists of.

Find the step your customer is standing on now

The first practical consequence: before formulating an offer, work out which step of this staircase your customer occupies at this moment. Not in general, not in theory, but in this specific category.

A customer at the anxiety stage is not ready to weigh subtle product advantages. They need a simple, comprehensible point of support that lowers the anxiety of first contact itself. A customer at the individuality stage will push away from any attempt to hand them a ready-made decision. They need room for their own choice and confirmation of their right to choose differently from everyone else.

For a company selling into Russia from abroad there is an extra layer. The brand itself can be a source of anxiety even for a customer who is mature in the category. Will the payment go through. Who answers if something arrives broken. Will this supplier still be here in a year. A buyer at the seventh stage in your category can meet your brand at the second, and the symptoms look identical to ignorance while the cause is entirely different. Treating it as ignorance is how a competent buyer gets talked to like a beginner and quietly leaves.

Speak one step ahead, not five

The second consequence concerns the zone of proximal development. A person responds more readily to an offer that runs slightly ahead of their current stage than to one that repeats it exactly or overshoots it by a mile.

A conversation with a customer at the fifth stage, who operates in family role models, is worth conducting with a light shift towards the sixth, towards the wider collective context. Jumping straight to the eighth, to the language of full autonomy and legalised selfishness, does not work: such a leap is simply not recognised as addressed to them. It reads as someone else’s conversation overheard by accident.

This is the quiet reason a brand voice imported wholesale fails in a new market even when the translation is good. The voice encodes a stage. If the stage is wrong the words can be perfect and the address still misses.

Regression is a signal, not a verdict

The third consequence is about moments of crisis. If a normally confident, independent customer suddenly behaves anxiously and chaotically, without criteria, that is not a reason to consider them less intelligent than usual. It is a signal of regression, a temporary slide down the staircase under the weight of circumstance.

Work with them the way you would work with a customer at that temporary stage rather than at their permanent one: more simply, with more to lean on, with fewer options in front of them. The classic mistake is to widen the choice at exactly this moment, on the theory that a good customer deserves more variants. A regressed buyer reads a widened choice as more anxiety and closes the tab.

Periods of general turbulence push a whole audience down a step at once, and a Russian audience has been through several such periods in recent years. A message calibrated for a calm market can land during a nervous quarter and feel presumptuous, without anything in the message having changed. This is also the practical argument for looking at your Russian market entry as a moving target rather than a document written once.

A market is never uniform

A market is never homogeneous. It holds, at the same time, the person who has just taken an item off the shelf in confusion and the person who has spent years building a personal system of criteria for that same shelf. Both stand on one staircase, simply on different steps of it.

Which is why a single message addressed to the whole market either reassures the anxious buyer and bores the mature one, or flatters the mature one and frightens everyone else. Segmentation by stage is more useful here than segmentation by demographics, because it predicts what the person can actually hear.

A conversation happens when you know precisely which step you met this person on today, and do not confuse it with the one they will be standing on tomorrow.

Frequently asked questions

Sources

• Russian version of this article on belokrylovo.ru: Стадии развития клиента