Message encoding: why one meaning sounds different to different people

Tell one person “we care about your safety” and another “you stay in control of the situation”. The meaning is almost identical. The reactions are not: one nods with relief, the other shrugs. The difference sits in the code the meaning was wrapped in, and the meaning itself did not change at all.

This is the most common reason a message that worked at home goes quiet in Russia. The company brings a proven idea, pays for a careful translation, launches, and the response is flat. Everyone starts looking at the wrong things: the bid, the budget, the channel. The idea may be fine. The code it arrived in was built for somebody else.

Why meaning has to be put into the recipient’s language

Encoding turns information from one form into another so that it is easier to send, store or read. We do it all day without noticing: a thought becomes words, an emotion becomes a tone of voice, an idea becomes a picture. In applied communication, encoding means choosing specific signs: which words, which images and which composition will carry your thought to the person on the other end.

It is easy to treat this as a technical detail, the polishing that happens after the real work. In fact it is the central act of communication. One idea can be encoded in dozens of ways, and almost all of them will fail, simply because they do not match the way the recipient reads signs.

Good encoding is about a match between the code of the sender and the code of the recipient, and beauty of phrasing matters much less. If your recipient reads the world through logic and figures and you encode the message through images and feelings, it will not reach them. It was well written. It was written in the wrong language.

For a company entering Russia this has a sharp practical edge. Translation replaces the language and keeps the code. The arguments stay the same, the order stays the same, the images stay the same, and so does the unspoken idea of what a convincing message looks like. All of that was tuned for readers in the home market. A literal Russian version of a good English page is often a message in the wrong code with correct grammar.

One fact, read by different rules

There is a classic experiment from child psychology that shows a gap between codes very clearly. A child watches water being poured from one glass into another, narrower and taller one, and is asked whether there is now more water. Up to a certain age the child answers “yes” with full confidence, because the level has risen, and volume as an abstraction is something they cannot yet read.

This is not the child’s mistake. It is a different code of perception. The same physical reality is read by different rules, depending on which reading instrument you have.

The same thing happens with adult recipients of messages. Their reading rules are set by temperament, habits and the context of their lives rather than by age. An encoding for someone who decides through numbers and facts will be strict, detailed and built on data. An encoding for someone who decides through images and sensations will be softer, more metaphorical, with atmosphere carrying more weight than argument.

Take one benefit, a saving of time. For the first reader it is encoded as “cuts the cycle by a third”. For the second it becomes “frees up your evening for what actually matters”. One fact, two codes. Neither is more honest than the other, and each one is invisible to the reader it was not written for.

Now add a market boundary. A Russian buyer and a buyer in your home market can share a temperament and still differ in what counts as a trustworthy sign. The words that sound confident in one culture can read as boastful in another. A guarantee that reassures at home can sound like a formality nobody intends to honour. The phrase your team debated for a week may be the one detail a Russian reader skips. Which way these shifts go for your product is something to check with real buyers, because a general rule about “Russians” will mislead you as often as it helps.

The mistake everyone makes

The most frequent error is simple: the author encodes the message the way they themselves perceive the world, instead of the way the recipient does. It is a natural error. We have no direct access to another person’s code, only to our own. So encoding takes a conscious effort to step outside your own point of reference and ask how the person you are writing to will read it.

Inside a foreign company this error multiplies. The message is written in headquarters, approved in headquarters, and judged by people who read it in their own code. It passes every internal review because every reviewer shares the author’s code. Then it meets the only reader who matters, and nobody in the approval chain could have predicted the reaction, because nobody in it reads the way that reader does.

The local team often notices the problem first. A Russian sales manager says the page “does not sound right”, cannot explain why, and gets overruled. That vague discomfort is usually a precise signal: the code does not match. It deserves a proper hearing.

How to find out what language your reader uses

Encoding is a separate step, and it does not happen by itself once the idea is good. Accept that, and you get a lever you did not have before. The idea can stay untouched while you re-encode it for different people and get a completely different response. This applies to ad copy, and equally to a conversation with a partner, a task explained to a colleague, a letter to a client.

The practical question sounds like this. Before you formulate anything, ask yourself which language this particular person uses to read the world, and set aside what you want to say for a moment. Do they prefer specifics or images? Do they respond to logic or to emotion? Do they need a list of facts, or one convincing picture? The answers settle the form of the message before you write the first word.

For the Russian market, the raw material for these answers is easier to reach than most foreign teams assume:

1. Search queries. Yandex shows the words people type when they look for what you sell. The phrasing tells you whether they think in specifications, in problems or in outcomes. It is often a different vocabulary from the one your category uses in English.
2. Questions to sales staff. What people ask before they buy is their code in its raw form. Collect the questions from calls and messenger chats for a few weeks, word for word, before rewriting any page.
3. Competitor reviews. Reviews show what buyers praise and what they resent, in their own words, with no marketing filter.
4. Conversations with buyers. A handful of real conversations with people who bought, or nearly bought, will tell you more than any translated brief.

Then test. Take one idea, encode it two ways, and run both versions side by side in separate ad groups or on two variants of a landing page. The response shows which code your audience reads. This is where research and Yandex Ads stop being separate jobs: the account becomes a way to measure the code, and it keeps doing that long after launch.

Why arguments about the right wording go nowhere

This is also why debates about the “right wording” are often pointless when they are held apart from the recipient. A formulation is neither right nor wrong on its own. It either matches or fails to match the code of whoever reads it. A phrase that moved one person may leave another cold, and both react with perfect logic, each through their own code.

A foreign team argues about wording in its own language and its own code, and then asks a translator to carry the winning version across. The debate was settled by the wrong judges. The useful question for the meeting is which version of this idea the Russian reader will recognise as addressed to them, and that question is answered with data from buyers rather than with taste.

Borrowing someone else’s glasses

The skill of encoding is the skill of putting on another person’s glasses for a while and looking at your own message through them. It requires dropping the illusion that your way of seeing the world is the only correct one, or the most obvious one. That refusal is what opens the door to the recipient. Volume and persistence will not get you through it. A precise match with their own code will.

For a company selling into Russia from abroad, the practical version looks like this:

1. Separate the idea from its current wording. Write down, in one plain sentence, what the message must make the buyer understand. That sentence is what you keep.
2. Treat the existing copy as one encoding among many. It was built for your home reader. It is a draft for Russia at best.
3. Collect the local code before writing. Queries, questions, reviews, conversations: in the buyer’s own words.
4. Encode for the reader, then test two versions. Let the market choose between them, and keep testing as the audience shifts.
5. Give the local team a vote on sound. Their discomfort with a phrase is data about the code.

A message does not change anything while it stays in your head, written in your language. It starts to work only when it has been put into the language of the person who will receive it.

Frequently asked questions

Sources

• Russian version of this article on belokrylovo.ru: Кодирование сообщения: почему один смысл звучит по-разному