Goal as a state: rethinking goal setting for the Russian market

“My goal is to buy a flat.” “Our goal is to raise revenue by thirty percent.” “Our goal is to launch a new product.” None of these sentences describes a goal. Each one names a means. The real goal hides one step further on, in the state a person expects to be in once they have the thing. That state moves the founder chasing a number, and it moves the customer standing at the till.

Marketers in the West will recognise part of this. The line about people wanting a hole rather than a drill, usually credited to Theodore Levitt, points the same way, and so does the jobs-to-be-done school. The state goes one step deeper than the hole. It asks who the person feels they have become.

For a company selling into Russia from another country, this stops being a matter of wording. Your product crosses the border unchanged. The state people want from it does not travel with it.

Why a flat is a means and safety is the goal

Someone says they want a flat. Ask them plainly why, and they start to explain. So a landlord cannot put them out at a month’s notice. So there is somewhere to come back to. So the children grow up in one place and stop moving every year. Behind the word “flat” stands a feeling: I am safe here, nobody can make me leave, the ground under me is firm.

There is a simple test. Imagine the person gets the same safety another way, say a guaranteed lifetime lease at a fixed price with the right to pass it on. Some people would then drop the idea of buying. So they never needed a flat. They needed the state it gave them.

Almost every wish works like this. A premium car is the feeling of having arrived. A diploma is “I have the right to sit at this table”. A promotion is “they see me, I am growing, I am not stuck”. A person always walks towards a state, and picks up the object on the way because it looks like the shortest route.

What changes when you stop selling the object

While you sell an object, you stand in a row of identical objects. A buyer opens an aggregator, sorts by price and leaves for whoever is cheaper. Every neighbour on the list does the same thing you do, so you can be replaced.

Russian commerce makes this row easy to build. Much buying starts inside comparison environments: Ozon, Wildberries and Yandex Market for goods, Avito for goods and services, Cian for property. A foreign brand arriving with a list of specifications has walked into the format where a higher price is hardest to defend.

Move your view to the state and the competitive field changes. A seller of flats who sells safety and a place of one’s own now competes with a country house, an insurance policy, savings on a deposit. That sounds like more competition. In practice you have left the price crush and begun talking about what brought the person in.

A bakery selling loaves is compared with the supermarket shelf and loses on price. A bakery selling a morning when the house smells of fresh bread sells the feeling of looking after your own. Outsourced accounting sells a night without worrying about the tax office. Whoever speaks about the state lifts the customer out of the price table.

Features prove, states persuade

Most brands describe themselves as a list of properties. A laptop has sixteen gigabytes of memory and a terabyte of storage. Behind those sits what the person pays for: “nothing freezes when the deadline is burning”, or “I look like a professional when I open this at a meeting”.

A brand that speaks the language of state gets inside a person’s picture of themselves, so replacing it means replacing part of that picture. A brand that speaks only of properties stays an outside tool, swapped the moment a neighbour offers more memory for less. Nobody beats a state with a bigger number.

So ask at what moment the customer feels the state they came for, and whether you help them feel it. A fitness app can write “over two hundred exercises in the library”. It can also show the moment someone climbs the stairs without losing their breath and thinks “I’m back in shape”. People keep the second kind of app.

Why the Google playbook does not carry this over

Four things differ for a company working on the Russian market, and none of them is about taste.

The channel speaks in objects. Google Ads is not available for reaching Russian buyers, so paid search means Yandex Direct, alongside VK Ads and Telegram Ads. A search query names an object almost by definition: people type what they want to buy. Your Yandex ad has to answer that object at once, then open the state in the second line and on the landing page. Yandex Wordstat, the free query tool, shows the object vocabulary and related phrases. Read it as raw material for interviews, because it will never give you the state itself.

The state has its own words. “Peace of mind” is a worn phrase in English, and a literal Russian version sounds like a translated brochure. Russian buyers describe the same relief in everyday idiom, such as чтобы голова не болела, literally “so my head doesn’t ache”, meaning “so this stops being my problem”. That phrase comes from buyers, never from a translator working on your English copy.

A state promise still answers to the law. Russian advertising law treats claims the advertiser cannot substantiate as unreliable, and that includes an unsupported “best” or “number one”. Sectors such as medicine and finance carry tighter limits on what an ad may promise. Everything also has to meet the rules on labelling and the Russian language. So write scenes you can back with facts, and have a local specialist read anything that sounds like a guarantee.

A foreign seller creates its own state question. Many international brands left Russia after 2022, and buyers remember. My working hypothesis, to be tested in your own interviews, is that a Russian customer of a foreign product often wants one extra state: confidence that support, parts and supply will still be there next year. If that holds in your category, specifications will not answer it. A local warehouse, a Russian contract and a named person to call will.

There is also a limit. Public buyers purchase through formal tenders under laws 44-FZ and 223-FZ, where set criteria and price decide the outcome. State language will not win a procedure like that.

Three whys: how to find the real goal

Take the wish a customer named aloud and ask “why” in a row. Three times is usually enough.

A flat. Why? To feel safe. Why safety? To be calm and stop tensing up at the thought of the future. Why calm? To free your head for what matters: children, work, yourself. The real goal lands at the bottom of this ladder: a life that no longer spends half its strength on anxiety.

A live example. A customer of an online school says: I want a course on targeted advertising. Why? To bring in leads myself without paying a contractor. Why? To stop depending on someone who keeps disappearing or burning the budget. Why? To feel that the business is in my hands. A school selling “twelve modules and a certificate” talks about the means. A school selling “you hold your own traffic in your own hands” hits the goal.

Run this on your own product. Often the second step surfaces something your advertising never mentions.

The same test on your own targets

“Thirty percent more revenue” is an object too. Ask why. To stop counting money at the end of the month. To hire someone and hand over the routine. To close the laptop in the evening. That is your state: freedom and a clear head.

If the goal is only the thirty percent, you push sales at any cost, burn out and find at the end of the year that there is more money and no relief. If the goal is “I am not tied to every deal”, you invest in repeat sales, the team and processes that take you off manual control. The number arrives as a consequence.

This is where goal setting meets stress. People burn out less from big goals than from object goals with the state lost behind them. A goal stated as a state comes with a built-in sensor: have you moved closer, or only got tired?

Apply it to the team too. Behind “increase conversion” may stand “stop fearing the ads are wasting money”. A head office can ask the same about “enter Russia”: what should be different for the company once it has? The answer shapes the market entry plan.

Where this goes wrong

Swapping the state for a slogan. “We bring happiness” is empty air, and more so after translation. A state is concrete and tied to a moment in the customer’s life: a morning when nothing hurts and you want to get up. The more specific the scene, the stronger the recognition.

Deciding features no longer matter. They do. Memory, deadlines, ingredients and warranties are how a person comes to believe the state is reachable. The state explains why to pay, and the properties prove the promise is real. The order is state first, then proof.

Deciding the state for the customer. One buyer takes a flat for safety, another for status, a third to move out at last and feel adult. Until you find out which is yours, you are guessing. Real goal setting in marketing starts with conversations: with customers, the sales team and people who have already bought. You cannot invent their “why” at a desk, least of all from another country.

What to do if you sell into Russia from abroad

1. Write down the phrase people arrive with. Take it from Russian sales calls, messenger chats and marketplace reviews.
2. Run three whys with real buyers. Hold the interviews in Russian and record the exact words.
3. Separate the states. Note which segment holds each one.
4. Check the continuity question. Ask what worries buyers about choosing a foreign supplier.
5. Rebuild the order on the page. Object in the ad headline, state in a concrete scene, then the proof.

Next time you write “our goal is”, ask why three times. A person almost never wants the flat itself. They want to sleep soundly at night. So sell the sleep.

Frequently asked questions

Sources

• Russian version of this article on belokrylovo.ru: Цель как состояние: пересобрать целеполагание