Feelings and emotions: what a buyer chooses and what they do not

“Pull yourself together and stop being angry.” The advice has never worked on anyone, and it never will, because it rests on a false premise: that a reaction can be switched off by an act of will, the way a light goes off in a room. The opposite belief is no better. “Something simply happened to me, I had nothing to do with it” hands the whole event to the outside world and leaves the person with nothing to do.

The truth sits between the two, and a precise distinction gets you to it. Feelings, emotions and the physical properties of things are three different predicates pointing in three different directions. For anyone who reads customers for a living, and especially for anyone reading them from another country, that distinction is the difference between fixing an episode and arguing with a mood.

Three layers that get called by one name

The three categories differ by where they are aimed.

A feeling is oriented towards the self. It is an internal predicate belonging to the person who carries it, and it exists whether or not an object is present for it to be about. An emotion is oriented towards an object. It is an interaction between a subject and something specific, it arises in that meeting, and it loses its form once the object is gone. A physical property is oriented entirely outwards. It belongs to the object itself and has no relation to any experiencing subject at all.

There is also a difference in duration. Feelings are longer and steadier. They run for days and months and stay as the background of a life. Emotions are shorter and bound much more tightly to a particular object or event. They flare and fade together with the situation that produced them.

Translate that to a purchase. The number printed on your price tag is a physical property of the offer, true whether or not anyone is looking at it. “That is expensive” is an emotion, aimed at that number inside this session, on this page. “I do not trust foreign sellers at the moment” is a feeling: it was there before your ad loaded, it will be there after your discount expires, and it is not about you.

Three statements that arrive in the same support inbox, looking like variations of one objection. They are not.

Anger as the test case

Take anger. As an emotion it is attached to an object: a particular person, a particular event, a particular unfairness here and now. It flares at the moment of interaction and loses its force fairly quickly once the object changes or disappears.

Irritability as a background feeling needs no object at all and can last for weeks. It is a general tone through which a person perceives whatever comes next, regardless of what is actually happening in front of them.

Hence the practical difference. Working with an emotion means dealing with the specific interaction that produced it. Working with a feeling means working with a longer background, one that will not vanish if you remove a single irritating object, because the feeling was longer and steadier than that object from the beginning.

A buyer who is angry about one delayed parcel is holding an emotion. Answer, fix, apologise, and the episode closes. A buyer who carries “orders from abroad never arrive” is holding a feeling. The parcel you rescue does not touch it. Tomorrow that background will find a new occasion, and the occasion may well be you again.

The background a foreign brand walks into

A company selling into Russia from elsewhere arrives inside a background it did not create and cannot address as an objection.

Doubt about whether the card will go through. Doubt about whether goods clear customs. Doubt about whether a foreign company will still be present in a year. None of this is aimed at your brand, which is precisely what makes it so easy to misread: it shows up in your form, in your chat and in your abandoned carts, so it looks like feedback about you. It is a self-oriented state that existed before contact. Your landing page became its occasion.

Western objection handling assumes the object is real. You hear “too expensive”, you answer with value, and the mechanism works because the objection genuinely concerns the thing named. Apply the same move to a background and you get a polite reply followed by silence. The argument landed on an object that was never the cause.

The second difference is where the reaction is legible. Google Ads and Meta platforms are out of reach in Russia, so the familiar sensors are missing along with the familiar channels. Reaction lands instead in places you have to watch deliberately: reviews on Yandex Maps and on marketplace cards, threads on Telegram and WhatsApp where a large share of qualified conversation happens, and session recordings in Yandex Metrica, where you can watch someone return to the delivery block four times without typing a word. That last one is the closest thing to a face you get from a distance.

The part that is genuinely yours

Here sits a philosophical knot worth naming, and it is anti-Sartrean in shape. We do not wholly choose our feelings and emotions: they do not appear or extinguish on command. And we are not wholly at their mercy either, as though they were weather happening to us. We show up in the interaction. A feeling or an emotion is born neither purely from a person’s inner construction nor purely from the external object, but at the seam between them, in the act of meeting.

Which means a person does not choose whether they will flare at a specific unfairness. What depends on them is how long the flare lasts, what it grows into, and which object it attaches to next.

For a company that is the whole operating margin. You do not choose whether a buyer is startled by your price or unnerved by a delivery estimate. You do decide what happens in the next forty minutes. An episode that gets named and answered stays an episode. An episode met with three days of silence, a template reply, or a support script asking the customer to remain calm has time to harden into a background feeling about your brand, and at that point it no longer needs your price tag to stay alive.

This is also why speed of reply in messengers matters more in Russia than the same metric does in a market that runs on email. The channel is fast, the expectation is fast, and a slow answer is read as an answer.

Two equally wrong positions

The first is demanding the switch. Expecting a market to simply be rational, rewriting the page with three more arguments for an audience whose difficulty is not informational, training support to make anger stop on request. This ignores that neither feelings nor emotions run on command.

The second is total abdication. “It is the market, nothing we can do, the background is what it is.” This drops the one lever that actually exists, since it is inside the interaction that a company either amplifies a reaction, lets it fade, or fixes it into a durable background feeling.

Both positions are comfortable. One lets you blame the customer for not responding to reason, the other lets you blame conditions for everything. Neither requires anyone to look at what happened in a specific conversation on a specific day.

How to sort your own inbox this week

A short route. Take the last thirty refusals, complaints and abandoned conversations from your Russian audience and sort them by one question: does this name an episode with us, or does it state a condition that predates us?

Episodes go into fast closure, in the channel where they arrived rather than in the one you prefer. Backgrounds go somewhere else entirely, because a discount aimed at a background is money spent on the wrong object. Backgrounds move on accumulated evidence: payment methods visible on the page instead of promised at checkout, delivery terms written in full, a named local partner, reviews from people who already have the goods in hand.

Then watch them in different places. Episodes surface in support queues and session recordings. Backgrounds surface in the conversion rate of a page that is otherwise fine and in what people search for immediately before your brand name. If you do not know what the background actually consists of, that is a customer research question and not an advertising one, and answering it first is what keeps a Yandex Ads budget from arguing with a mood at auction prices.

Why the distinction earns its keep

Anger, annoyance and a bad mood look like shades of one thing. Behind them can stand two different phenomena: a short flare tied to an object, and a long background that exists on its own terms.

Whoever stops confusing the two stops trying to cure a background with a single conversation, and stops demanding that a flare hold on for weeks merely because that would make it easier to explain.

Frequently asked questions

Sources

• Russian version of this article on belokrylovo.ru: Чувства и эмоции: что вы выбираете, а что нет