Why a customer doesn't know the main thing about themselves

Ask a shopper why they chose this particular coffee and they will name a reason: the taste, the price, beans from the right country. Watch the same person in the store and you see something else. The hand went to the familiar pack a second before they had a chance to think anything at all.

The reason they gave you comes from explicit memory, the part a person can describe in words. The choice itself was made by another layer, one the person has no direct access to. This is why surveys so often mislead, and why advertising budgets so often go to the wrong place. For a company entering Russia the effect is sharper still, because the layer that makes the choice was formed on channels you have barely touched yet.

Two layers of memory: what you can tell and what steers you quietly

Think of memory as a building with an upper floor and a basement. The upper floor holds events, dates, names and facts: where you spent last summer, the name of your first manager, the price of your favourite cheese. This layer is easy to reach and easy to put into words.

The basement holds skills, habits, automatic reactions and emotional responses. It cannot be narrated, it appears in action. Try to explain in words how you keep your balance on a bicycle. You will fail, and yet your body does it. Try to explain why one smell calms you and another makes you uneasy. You cannot name the cause, but the reaction fires anyway.

Psychology calls the upper floor explicit memory and the basement implicit memory. Implicit memory means what we do without thinking, on autopilot. The upper floor stores what a person knows about themselves. The basement stores what actually moves them.

Why a customer’s story does not match their behaviour

The most valuable material for a marketer begins where the two layers diverge. A person says one thing and does another. This is not lying. It is how the mind is built.

A customer insists they choose rationally and compare specifications, while their hand goes to the brand they have seen since childhood. Another says status means nothing to them and buys things that signal belonging to a certain circle. An employee in an exit interview says they are leaving over pay, while the real reason is a broken relationship with their manager, long filed in memory as an ordinary work situation.

Anyone who has run a survey before a product launch has met this gap. In a focus group people praise the healthy porridge and promise to buy it. In the store they take the sugary cereal. A client buying advertising services swears they only look at price, and signs with whoever called back on time and spoke calmly. Nobody is deceiving you on purpose. They honestly report what they pull from the upper layer, while the lower layer handles the choice.

A questionnaire and a focus group work with the upper layer. The purchase happens on the lower one. You put a question to one system while a different system makes the decision, so two different answers should not surprise you.

What exactly is hidden in the lower layer

The lower layer is not uniform. Several mechanisms live there, and it helps to tell them apart, because you influence each one differently.

The first is memory of the body and of actions: touch typing, the usual route to work, the order of steps when checking out in a familiar app. Everything that happens without thinking through each step.

The second is emotional memory. A smell that calms you because your grandmother’s house smelled like that. A colour that makes you anxious because it reminds you of a hospital. A voice you want to trust for no sensible reason. This like or dislike response fires before reasoning switches on.

The third is recognition. You pick out the logo of your bank in a fraction of a second. You never memorised it on purpose, you saw it a thousand times, and each contact widened the channel until recognition became instant.

All three run constantly, without conscious participation, and shape the choice more strongly than anything the person can explain.

Why the lower layer decides before reason wakes up

Implicit memory is older, faster and cheaper for the brain. It switches on at the earliest stages of perception, before the upper layer arrives with its comparisons.

Look at the order of events at a shelf. By the time you consciously recall that this yoghurt has good ingredients, your body has already reached toward one pot or pulled back from another. The decision is in effect made. The arguments come afterwards, to explain a choice that already happened.

For a brand this matters a great deal. Rational arguments such as specifications, figures and comparison tables work with the upper layer, which is slow, costly and late. Images, sound, the shape of the pack and the feel of it in the hand work with the lower layer, which is fast, automatic and early. In most purchases the decision ripens below, and the arguments above only dress it up after the fact.

A brand that lives only in the upper layer, as a name and a list of features, is vulnerable: a competitor with slightly better numbers pushes it aside. A brand settled into the lower layer, with a habit of picking it and instant recognition, holds firm, because switching means rebuilding deep channels. Good branding works toward this stability.

How the lower layer forms: repetition in the right setting

The upper layer fills through deliberate learning. The lower layer fills through living the same thing many times in a particular setting. You did not learn to ride a bicycle from a manual. You fell and tried again until the movement became automatic.

For advertising this matters. One contact is enough to remember a name. For a brand to settle into the lower layer you need a series of contacts in the right setting, each treading the path a little deeper.

Roughly: the first contact puts the name into the upper layer. Around the twentieth, the brand starts to be recognised on its own. Around the hundredth it becomes part of the autopilot. Regular contacts through search and display advertising, in a constant visual style, tread that path.

The typical mistake follows. A company changes its brand colour, typeface and tone every six months because the new marketer finds the old version dull. The name survives in the upper layer, while the lower layer resets each time: a path trodden halfway and abandoned. The customer has sort of heard of you, but the hand does not reach. Stability comes from repeating the same image year after year. Boring for the team, and exactly how a habit is built.

What changes when you sell in Russia

Everything above holds in any market. The Russian angle lies in where the contacts happen and what a foreign company brings with it.

Implicit memory is tied to setting. Recognition built in Google results, on Amazon and in Western social feeds stays mostly where it was formed. A Russian buyer’s paths are trodden elsewhere: in Yandex search results and the Yandex Advertising Network, on Ozon and Wildberries, in VK and in Telegram channels. If your brand has little history on these surfaces, the name may be known while the automatic reach for your product is missing. Home-market awareness is an upper-layer asset. In Russia the lower layer usually has to be built from the start.

Foreign companies also tend to break their own consistency on entry. The Russian site gets translated rather than designed, the Russian ad creatives are made by a local contractor in a different style, and the name appears in Latin letters in one place and in Cyrillic in another. Each variation is a separate path, and none of them gets trodden deep. Decide early how the brand looks and sounds in Russian, then hold it across search ads, marketplace cards and social channels.

Research needs the same correction. A survey of Russian buyers will give you their explanations, and explanations are useful for wording and objections. Validate them against behaviour on local surfaces: what people search for in Yandex, which cards they open on a marketplace, what they do on your Russian pages according to Yandex Metrica session recordings. If you planned research around Google tools and Western panels, that data describes a different shelf.

How to see what already sits in a customer’s lower layer

You cannot ask directly, because the person cannot reach this layer. You can watch behaviour, and it tells you more than any questionnaire.

Look at three things. The speed of recognition: how long it takes to find your product among competitors on a shelf or a screen. The automatism of choice: whether the hand goes to your pack without hesitation. The emotion at contact: whether the person relaxes, tenses or brightens on seeing your brand.

None of this needs a question. Eye-tracking, a recording of where the gaze goes, shows how quickly the eye picks you out. Analysis of the real purchase path shows whether there is an automatic script. A comparison of two versions of an ad or a pack shows where the path is already trodden. This is honest perception research: you read behaviour, not a person’s account of themselves. It is the core of how I approach customer research for companies entering Russia.

What a business should do with this

The upper layer of memory is what the customer can tell you. The lower one quietly guides their hand, and the purchase is usually born there.

Three working rules follow. First, check direct answers against observed behaviour on the site and at the shelf. Second, invest in what acts on the lower layer: a recognisable image, repeated contact, the feel of the encounter. A specification table persuades reason, while the choice is often settled by the shape of the pack and a familiar colour. Third, count the frequency of contact as a resource. One impression gives a name, a series of impressions in a constant style builds a habit, and a competitor finds a habit much harder to beat than a figure in a price list. In Russia that frequency has to be earned on local channels, which is why brand strategy and media planning belong in the same conversation.

A customer will never tell you why they really chose you. They do not know it themselves, and there is no cunning in that. Their hand knows exactly. Read the hand, not what they write in the questionnaire.

Frequently asked questions

Sources

• Russian version of this article on belokrylovo.ru: Почему человек не знает о себе главного