Mechanism or story: two ways your buyers think

One prospect reads your case study, nods and says: “Yes, it was the same for us.” Another reads the same case, frowns and asks: “Why did it work for you? What exactly did you change?” The first recognises a familiar picture. The second climbs inside it and takes it apart. The Russian original of this piece calls the second habit daimonic thinking: a mind that asks what a thing is made of and why it is built that way, rather than what it looks like.

The difference sounds minor. In practice it decides whether someone buys from you on the strength of a good story or closes the tab because a story is not enough. If your whole marketing is built for one type, you lose the other half of your audience quietly, and you never find out why.

For a company selling into Russia from abroad, this matters more than it seems, and I will come back to the reason. First, the distinction itself.

“Looks like” versus “why is it so”

Fire is the easiest illustration. You can know that fire is hot because you burned your fingers as a child and remembered to keep your hands away. That is enough to survive. This kind of thinking recognises shapes: you see something similar, pull a ready conclusion out of memory and move on.

Or you can ask why fire is hot at all. What happens to the molecules, why one material burns and another does not. Now the person is breaking the picture into parts. Events interest them less than the causes of events.

In the first mode the head works like a catalogue of familiar situations. In the second it works like a workshop where anything can be taken apart and reassembled. Both modes are normal, and all of us switch between them many times a day. But each person has a default, the mode they fall into when they meet something new.

This is where marketing starts. The catalogue reader only needs to recognise something familiar and good in your offer. The workshop reader takes the offer apart and checks whether the logic inside holds together. If it does not, no emotion will keep them on the page.

Picture two people choosing a contractor to build a website. One opens the portfolio, sees attractive work and sends an inquiry. The other opens the same portfolio and asks how you measure conversion and what you do when a site does not sell. Two people, one portfolio, two completely different conversations.

How it shows up in your own business

Take a simple situation: a visitor left without buying. Two business owners react differently.

The first says: “Not our client, the price did not suit them.” They applied a familiar template and calmed down. Problem closed.

The second starts digging. On which screen did the person leave? What did they see a second before? What did the button say? They lay the exit out in pieces and look for the properties of the page, the price and the copy that added up to it.

Your buyers split the same way. One is happy with a story: “Marina had a business just like yours, she came to us, and here is the result.” They recognise themselves in Marina and lean in. Another gets nothing from that story. They ask why it worked for Marina, what exactly was done, what the result is made of. They need a mechanism, not an inspiring plot.

If you sell only through stories, you catch the first group well and lose the second. And the second group is often the one with budget and long, careful decisions: engineers, financial directors, technical directors, doctors, lawyers. People trained not to take anything on trust.

Why one buyer needs a story and another needs a blueprint

The person who thinks in “looks like” buys through trust and image. They want to feel you are one of their own, that you have solved this before, that someone like them is nearby and it worked out for that person. Reviews, the founder’s face, a live case, emotion: that is their currency.

The person who thinks in “why is it so” buys through understanding. They need to see how exactly you get the result and what you do at each stage. A polished emotional pitch makes them suspicious: too smooth, where is the catch. Give them the scheme and the logic, and they relax.

Here is the treacherous part. The same page looks convincing to the first reader and empty to the second. The second reads your promises of sales growth and thinks: “Growth from what?” They leave because you did not answer their real question, and that question was “how is this built”, with price far down the list.

I see this constantly in reviews. Traffic arrives and inquiries do not. The page is all stories and emotion, while the audience is technical and used to taking everything down to the last screw. People came for a blueprint and were handed a postcard. I cover how this mismatch damages conversion in more depth in the material on brand and perception.

The reverse mistake exists too. The audience lives on recognition, and the company buries it in tables and technical detail. A dry breakdown kills the emotion, and without emotion there is no purchase. So the question is never whether stories or mechanisms are better in general. The question is what this particular person needs.

Where the Russian market changes the picture

Here is why a foreign company should care more than a local one.

Much Western B2B content is built on storytelling: customer stories, founder journeys, before-and-after narratives. When a company enters Russia, the Russian site is usually translated from that original and keeps the same structure and the same reliance on narrative. Nobody asks whether the Russian audience for this product decides in the same mode.

Often it does not, and the reason is the segment, not some national character. Foreign companies come to Russia with industrial equipment, software for production and logistics, components, medical and financial services. These are exactly the fields where buyers are trained for years to take things apart. A translated customer story about a company they have never heard of, in a country they do not work in, gives them nothing to recognise. Recognition needs a familiar face, and a foreign case rarely supplies one. What still works across borders is the mechanism: the steps, the logic, the criteria, the limits.

The second Russian specific is where the conversation happens. A large share of first contact here runs through messengers, Telegram and WhatsApp, rather than through a form and an email thread. That is good news for diagnosis. The questions buyers type in a chat are short and unpolished, and they show the thinking mode more clearly than any survey.

The third is advertising. In Yandex Direct the headline is short, and it has room for one idea. That forces the choice: the situation and the person, or the cause and the mechanism. A Google Ads habit of packing several benefits into one ad does not solve this, it just blurs both messages.

How to tell which mode your audience is in

There is no need to guess. A few signs show which mode your buyer lives in.

Listen to the questions you get in chats and on calls. “Has anyone already done this, show me an example” is recognition: the person needs a similar case. “What makes this work, explain the logic” is the workshop: the person needs a cause. Take the last twenty conversations and simply count which kind dominates. For a company selling into Russia, add the messenger chats your local partner or sales manager handles to the website forms.

Look at the field. Where people are trained for years to take things apart, the “why is it so” mode prevails: development, engineering, science, medicine, finance, manufacturing. Where decisions are fast and based on feeling, recognition works more often: mass-market goods, emotional and impulse purchases, beauty, experiences.

Check yourself as a client. When something breaks, do you act by analogy or look for the part that failed? Your own mode often matches your audience, because we attract people like ourselves. Not always, and catching the difference early is cheaper than discovering it through lost sales. This is the core of what we do in customer research.

What to change in copy, ads and product

Once you know who is in front of you, the rest is straightforward.

For recognition buyers, strengthen image and closeness: live stories and specific people the client can compare themselves with. Emotion here is a load-bearing wall, not decoration. In Russia, try to make those stories local: a familiar sector, a familiar city, a familiar problem.

For workshop buyers, show the structure. Replace “we will increase your sales” with “here is what growth is made of: first we fix this, because it slows down that, then we change this”. Break the result into causes. Give stages and criteria. For this buyer an instruction is worth more than inspiration.

In advertising the same applies. One offer aimed at different audiences should hit different points. Imagine you sell an accounting system for small manufacturers. A recognition headline: “Tired of your warehouse and your accounts living in separate spreadsheets?” The reader thinks: that is us. A workshop headline: “Cost per batch calculated automatically, and here is from which data.” The first reader finds the second headline dull. The second reader finds the first one empty. Same product, same benefit, different packaging for a different kind of head. Until you know who comes to you, you are shooting blind and blaming the misses on expensive traffic. How to split these messages inside one campaign is covered in the section on Yandex Ads.

One more point about trust. The buyer who takes everything apart senses falseness faster. With this audience an honest account of your limits sells better than a flawless facade: say plainly where your method does not work and who you are not right for.

The same goes for the product. If clients need to see the mechanism, show the work: dashboards instead of “trust us”, an explanation of each step. You are selling a clear road to the result.

The most expensive habit to drop is assuming every client is built like you. Show each type what they are looking for, and both stay. Give both only a story, and half will leave without ever telling you what was missing.

Frequently asked questions

Sources

• Russian version of this article on belokrylovo.ru: Даймоническое мышление: свойства важнее сценариев