The identity scale: how close is it to "me"?

A person reads a news story about an earthquake on another continent. Thousands of people are dead. The reader sighs and carries on drinking coffee. An hour later the same person is yelling into the phone because a neighbour scratched their car in the car park. One scratch against thousands of deaths, and the scratch gets the stronger reaction.

This is not callousness. It is how evaluation is built. The identity scale answers one question: how much does what happened feel like “mine”? The closer an object is to the word “mine”, the louder the emotion. The car stands right next to “me” on that scale. A distant country sits at the far end, almost over the horizon.

For a marketer this is the first coordinate of any customer reaction. The question is “did it land inside the zone of what is mine, or pass by?” For a foreign company selling in Russia it matters twice over: a foreign brand starts here much further from the centre than it did at home.

Why one axis comes before all the others

An emotion can be broken down into a dozen parameters, but one question comes first: how much is the object that caused the feeling part of me?

Picture an axis. At one pole sits everything a person is fused with: their body, their name, their family, their values, the team they support, the brand they have used for years. A blow to any of these feels like a blow to oneself. The reaction is at its peak, because the core has been touched.

At the other pole sit distant things: strangers, unfamiliar companies, abstract figures. A firm the person has never heard of goes bankrupt. Something is happening, but to someone else. The brain registers the fact and does not start an emotion.

Between the poles there is a gradual slope. A colleague is closer to “mine” than a passer-by, and further than a brother. The coffee shop someone has visited for five years is closer than the one that opened yesterday. The strength of feeling grows as the object creeps towards the centre.

Where the “illogical” outbursts come from

A client calmly listens to harsh criticism of their work and nods. Five minutes later they flare up over a harmless remark about their phone. From the outside it looks absurd: surely work matters more than a phone. On the identity scale it makes perfect sense.

For this person, work sits on the periphery: a tool for earning money. The phone ended up in the core: status, habit, “that is mine, hands off”. A remark about it hits the person, and they defend themselves as if insulted directly.

The strength of a reaction tells you where the object stands. Criticise someone’s child and you get the maximum. Criticise an owner’s company and it hurts a lot. Criticise an industry in another country and nothing happens. The same jab, a different distance to “me”, a different temperature of response.

This gives a simple rule for negotiations. If a client reacts sharply and out of proportion to the trigger, you have touched their identity. Do not retreat in a panic and do not push harder. First work out what exactly you touched.

The same mechanism explains why some objections dissolve and others turn into a wall. A client who says “a bit expensive” and then agrees to instalments keeps money on the periphery. A client who clings to a minor contract clause has been hit in the core: a sense of control, a fear of looking cheated, a painful past experience. Arguing about the clause is pointless. Work with what stands behind it.

Foreign companies meet this in Russian negotiations more often than they expect. Boilerplate from a head office lawyer can read to a Russian buyer as distrust, and then the fight over wording is a fight about standing that no legal clarification settles.

How to measure the distance to “me”

The most honest marker hides in speech. Possessive pronouns reveal where an object stands more precisely than any survey. “My bank” and “the bank I use” describe the same institution at two different psychological addresses.

Listen to how clients talk about your product. In Russian, «наша CRM» (“our CRM”) sounds very different from «система, которую нам поставили» (“the system they installed for us”). Every “my” and “our” pulls the object towards the centre. Every “which” pushes it to the periphery. The pronouns tell you whether the product has become part of the person or remains a rented object.

Here a company entering Russia hits a practical problem. Its usual research is a translated questionnaire with rating scales, and scales flatten exactly this signal. Pronouns only show up in live Russian speech: recorded interviews and sales calls read line by line. That is why customer research for this market starts with conversations, not with a survey copied from headquarters.

The second marker sounds paradoxical. Irritation shows what matters more accurately than love does. What annoys a person is inside the zone; what leaves them indifferent is outside. Look less at what customers praise and more at what drives them mad.

“Definitely not mine” holds just as tight

Now the less obvious part. An object can stand inside the zone of identity with a minus sign as well as a plus. Some people will “never buy Samsung in their life”. Some will “never get behind the wheel of a Russian-made car”. They seem not to care. In fact they are as involved as the fans, only with the opposite charge.

Someone who loudly hates a brand thinks about it often and with heat, argues and gets angry in the comments. Real indifference looks different: the person simply does not remember the brand exists. Hatred is attention. Being forgotten is the end.

For business the conclusion is unpleasant but useful. An angry review is a signal that you have landed in the zone, and that customer can still be worked with. The real trouble is when nobody talks about you. Irritation can be worked with. Emptiness cannot.

In Russia this has a specific edge. For part of the audience “foreign” is itself an identity marker, with a plus for some buyers and a minus for others. A Western company arrives already placed on someone’s scale, and the angry comment under its first ad may be a reaction to “foreign” rather than to the product. That is still a foothold: the person has noticed you.

The same move helps find your real competitors. Ask clients what drives them mad in your category. A coffee shop owner who winces at “chain coffee from a petrol station” has handed you their coordinate system: their identity rests on standing against the conveyor belt, and a whole brand message can be built on that. Irritation is a ready map of who a customer does not want to be, and therefore of who they do.

The borders of the zone move

The scale is not nailed down. The borders of “mine” expand and shrink with the moment and the setting.

A fan at a stadium shouts “we scored”, though they spent the whole match eating sunflower seeds in the stands. For ninety minutes the team became part of their “me”. On the way home it became “they” again. That stretched moment was the window in which the fan bought a scarf and a beer in a branded cup.

This is where emotional loyalty comes from. There are designers for whom Apple hardware stopped being a tool long ago and became part of who they are. Switching systems would mean giving up a piece of themselves, and people defend what hurts. Such a customer does not compare prices. A brand has one job here: to get into the expanded zone and settle there.

Two roads: enter the zone or widen it

Practical work with the identity scale comes down to a choice between two roads. Both work, at different speeds and different costs.

The first road is to plug into a zone that already exists. You find what the audience identifies with right now and hook your message onto it. If your clients are entrepreneurs fused with the idea of growth, talk about growth. If they identify with control, show control. You connect to an identity that is already there. It is fast and cheap. In Yandex Direct this means building segments and ad texts around what your Russian audience already treats as its own, rather than translating the slogan that worked in your home market.

The second road is longer. You widen the zone, pulling the product step by step from “not mine” into “mine”. Each contact moves you slightly closer to the centre: “heard of you somewhere”, then “a familiar name”, then “tried it, it was fine”, and finally “this is my service, I recommend it”. In between lie months and dozens of touches. At the end you have a client no discount can lure away. In Russia many of those touches happen outside the search results page: a Telegram channel the buyer reads, a manager who answers in a messenger, a familiar name on a marketplace.

Most strong brands take both roads at once: they hook onto an existing identity to be noticed, then patiently move towards the core. The first move brings a sale today. The second turns a buyer into one of your own. Working this out is the core of a brand strategy for a new market.

One mistake sounds logical and works badly: demanding “my brand” love from a newcomer still at “heard of you somewhere”. You cannot skip steps on the scale. A foreign seller’s declaration of eternal partnership, translated straight from a global brand book, produces awkwardness rather than trust, and a wish to step back.

What to do with this tomorrow

Take any reaction from your customer and ask whether it sits inside the zone or outside, instead of whether they liked it. A sharp answer, defensiveness and argument mean you got inside. Polite indifference means you passed by, and no argument will help yet: for that person the product does not exist. With someone inside the zone you work things through. With someone outside it you first try to get any response at all, anything except a yawn.

Then decide by situation. If you touched the zone from the wrong side, step back and come in another way. If you passed by, start a series of contacts and pull yourself in slowly. If you landed well, hold your ground and do not leave.

People defend what they have become, whether or not it is useful. Get there, and they stop choosing you on price.

Frequently asked questions

Sources

• Russian version of this article on belokrylovo.ru: Шкала идентичности: свой или чужой