Identity only appears next to someone else

A stone does not need to know what it is. A river does not have to decide which river it belongs to. In a purely physical environment the question “who am I” never comes up: there is no culture there, no symbols, only a reaction to a stimulus. Identity appears at the moment someone else turns up and has to be recognised as one of us or one of them.

This sounds like philosophy, and it is. It is also the most practical thing a company entering a new market can understand about its buyers. Before a customer weighs your price, your specifications or your case studies, they have already placed you on one side of a line. The line was drawn long before your first ad ran, and most of what you say lands differently depending on which side of it you ended up.

Below: where the need for shared identity comes from, the two different kinds of belonging that are easy to confuse, why arguments move the line so rarely, and what this means for a foreign brand selling to Russian customers.

Identity is born together with the other

As soon as another subject appears in the field, as opposed to a mere object in the environment, a task arises: are we “us” with this one, or not? To become “us” you need a shared identity, something you can recognise in the other as matching yourself.

That shared identity is expressed in three registers. It is expressed ritually, the way a flock of birds synchronises into a single movement with no command centre. It is expressed through behaviour, through patterns of action that match. And it is expressed symbolically, through signs that are recognised as belonging to our side.

This need has little to do with morality or with social norms in the narrow sense. It is a basic mechanism of coordination. Without a shared identity a group cannot act as a whole, and every participant remains a separate unit following their own logic.

For a brand, the consequence is direct. A market is a set of overlapping groups, each with its own rituals, behaviours and symbols. A company that enters it is another subject showing up in the field, and the first thing the field does is run the recognition check.

Two kinds of belonging

It helps to separate two forms that look alike from a distance.

Involuntary belonging is unconditional, unconscious membership in a larger whole, whether a species or a crowd, without any awareness of it. A person in this mode belongs to the group without thinking about it. They react the way their kind reacts and fall into step with the crowd without choosing to.

Voluntary belonging works differently. It is self-awareness: the ability to draw a line and say that I relate to this person and not to that one. Here identity becomes a matter of choice rather than an automatic given. Voluntary belonging requires a formed self, a centre that knows how to tell self from not-self.

Most of what marketers call loyalty, community or brand affinity sits in the voluntary category. A customer decides that a brand is theirs, that its people speak their language, that buying from it says something true about them. The trap is to assume that because the choice is conscious, it is also rational.

Why the voluntary choice rests on something much earlier

The least obvious consequence is this: to understand an adult’s voluntary identity you have to go back to the age when it was formed. The adult choice of “who I am with” is not a spontaneous decision by a mature mind. It is a layer built over a much earlier mechanism of distinguishing self from not-self, laid down in the first years of life, long before any capacity for reflection.

That explains why logical arguments so rarely change whom a person considers one of their own. Debates about values, statistics, reasonable points all work poorly, because an adult’s voluntary identity still rests on a structure that was laid down involuntarily, at an age of which no conscious memory remains.

Translate this into a sales situation. A foreign supplier arrives with a better product and a comparison table that proves it. The buyer reads the table, agrees with every line and still orders from the local competitor they have worked with for years. From the supplier’s side this looks irrational. From the buyer’s side nothing irrational happened: the table was an argument, and the choice was never made at the level of arguments.

The office example: ours and not ours

The original article uses a scene most people know from work. In any team, sooner or later, a division emerges that has nothing to do with formal roles. One colleague is perceived as one of ours, although formally they do the same job as another, who is perceived as an outsider. Often this split cannot be explained rationally. A common project, a common goal and shared formal attributes ought to be enough for one identity, but it does not form.

The reason is that voluntary belonging is triggered by deep recognition rather than by a formal criterion, by that same mechanism of telling self from not-self which took shape long before the person joined this particular team. A match in rhythm, in small gestures, in unspoken expectations is read more precisely than a match in job descriptions.

Buyers treat suppliers the way colleagues treat colleagues. Two vendors can offer an identical function, and one is felt as close while the other stays foreign. The difference often lives in the same small places: how quickly a reply comes, in which channel, in what register, with what assumptions about how a deal is supposed to go.

What changes when the market is Russia

The mechanism is universal. The markers of “us” are local, and here a company that has grown up on Google, Meta and Western B2B habits usually carries the wrong set without noticing.

The recognition check runs on local signals. A brand whose Russian presence is a translated version of its global site speaks with the rhythm and assumptions of another market. Each sentence may be correct and the whole may still read as foreign, because the symbols, the examples and the manner of address belong to a different group. This is the symbolic register from the section above, and it is the one foreign companies neglect most.

The channels are part of the ritual. In Russia a large part of business communication happens in messengers and in the local ecosystem of platforms. A company that insists on email threads and its own portal is asking the buyer to step into its ritual instead of joining theirs. That is a behavioural mismatch, and it is felt before it is articulated.

Search and advertising sit inside a different environment. Yandex, VK and Telegram are where Russian buyers meet brands, and the familiar faces in those places are local. A foreign brand appearing there with a campaign ported from Google Ads looks like a visitor. Nothing about the product has to be wrong for that to happen.

Recommendation carries the line across. When the line between us and them is drawn at such an early level, the cheapest way over it is often through someone already on the right side: a partner, a local team member, a community the buyer belongs to. This is an interpretation of the mechanism, not a measured fact about Russia, but it matches how belonging works in the original argument: people accept what arrives from within their own group.

The practical demand of the local market follows from all four points. You cannot argue your way into being one of their own. You have to show up in their rituals, match their behaviour and use symbols they recognise.

What a company selling into Russia from abroad can do

The original article ends on a hopeful note, and it is the useful part. If identity is expressed ritually, behaviourally and symbolically, it can also be grown by those same means: through joint action, a repeated ritual, a shared symbol, rather than through debate. Shared identity is built by repeating what used to make “us” a real “us”. Joint action comes before a joint opinion.

For a foreign brand this turns into a short working list.

1. Audit your symbols as well as your translation. Go through the Russian site, the ads and the sales deck and ask of each image, example and turn of phrase: would a local buyer recognise this as theirs? Translation accuracy is the floor. Recognition is the goal.
2. Move into the buyer’s channels. Answer where they write, at the speed they expect. A behavioural match in the first contact does more for belonging than any claim on the homepage.
3. Create a repeated format. A regular newsletter, a recurring review, a standing meeting: anything that turns contact into a ritual. Belonging grows from repetition, and one-off campaigns do not repeat.
4. Act together before you persuade. A pilot, a shared task, a jointly produced result gives the buyer a real “we did this” to point to. That is the joint action the mechanism responds to.
5. Do not expect one conversation to turn an outsider into an insider. Identity is not a position that can be changed by persuasion. Plan for it as a process with a timeline, and measure it as one.

Who am I before anyone else appears

The question “who am I” sounds as if it comes before everything else. In fact the reverse is true: first the other appears, and only with the other comes the need to answer. Identity is not an inner property that ripens in solitude. It is a response to someone else’s presence.

For a company, the equivalent question is “who are we in this market”, and it gets the same answer. It is settled in the encounter with local buyers, by the signals they read in you, and the border between us and them was drawn long before anyone put it into words. Your arguments matter once you are on the right side of that border. Getting there is a matter of rhythm, ritual and symbols.

Frequently asked questions

Sources

• Russian version of this article on belokrylovo.ru: Идентичность рождается только рядом с другим