A metaphor works like a live wire, not a decoration

Tell a grieving person that time heals, and you will most likely get a polite “yes, probably”. Say to the same person that the wound inside is open right now, that it will close slowly, layer by layer, and that this is normal for something so deep, and you may see their breathing change. The difference lies elsewhere than in vocabulary. The second message travelled through a channel. The first slid past.

That is the gap between a plain statement and a metaphor. A metaphor has physics as well as meaning, and anyone who writes brand messages for a foreign market needs to understand that physics before spending money on it.

A channel, not an ornament

The usual way to think about metaphor in marketing is decorative. The copywriter finds a vivid image, the brand manager approves it because it sounds good, and the image goes on a billboard. The assumption underneath is that meaning travels with the words and the image just makes it prettier.

A more useful model treats metaphor as a channel between reality and the level at which a person makes sense of things. Through that channel you pass more than information: you pass energy. Like any channel, it has a purpose, a direction and a structure with its own properties. It has a sender and a receiver. At the moment of transmission the task is bigger than stating a fact. You need to reach the right level of meaning in the other person, put them in a certain state and start a certain internal process.

That layered signal is what a metaphor is. It is the whole message, together with the effect it produces, rather than a coat of paint on top of it.

For a company entering Russia, this changes the question you ask about your creative. The question “does this image look good in Russian?” is the wrong one. The right one is “does this image have a circuit to connect to in the head of a Russian buyer?”

Why a symbol alone changes nothing

There are two modes of influence worth separating: the stimulus and the symbol.

A symbol is an optimisation. It is a compressed image instead of a long explanation, a way to save effort and time. Brands love symbols for exactly that reason: a logo, a mascot, a one-word slogan. But a purely symbolic method does not produce change on its own. If the metaphor stays a neat label, nothing moves. The mind recognises it and the state stays untouched.

What works is a pairing of influence and stimulation, which can be called push-pull: pressure and attraction at once, a question and an image, something named and something lived through at the same moment. Without that pairing, the system reacts in one of two incomplete ways.

In the first, the person goes through the experience but their state does not change. The image touches them and leads nowhere. In the second, the state changes but without awareness. Something happened, and the person cannot say what or why. Both outcomes are unstable. Sooner or later they end in a relapse to the starting point or in a sharp, uncontrolled release. A lasting effect comes only from a metaphor balanced by stimulation: an image that names and pushes in the same breath.

Translated into advertising, this explains a common disappointment. A campaign can score well on recall and still fail to move anyone to act. Recall measures whether the symbol was recognised. It says nothing about whether current flowed.

The second condition: tuning between two structures

Every participant in a conversation carries an internal system of principles, a personal set of domains and associations. The quality of a metaphorical transfer does not depend on how precisely you can predict the other person’s reaction. That is impossible and unnecessary. It depends on whether they can unpack what you packed into the image.

Shared culture and shared experience raise the odds of a successful unpacking. Sharply different culture and experience push those odds close to zero, no matter how beautiful the metaphor is.

This is the point where a global brand walks into trouble in Russia. The creative that worked at home was tuned, often without anyone noticing, to a home audience’s set of associations. Sports references, school memories, holiday rituals, film quotes, idioms about money and success: each of these is a socket the image plugs into. Move the same image into a market where those sockets are shaped differently and the plug hangs in the air. The words are translated correctly. The picture is still attractive. The charge simply has nowhere to go.

Russian practice also differs from the Western default in how much people read into an image. A working hypothesis, worth testing in your own category rather than taking on faith, is that Russian readers tend to look for subtext and are quick to notice when a phrase has been carried over from another language without being rethought. A translated metaphor that feels borrowed signals that the company did not bother to learn the audience. That reaction is a state change too, just the wrong one.

How Russia differs from the Google playbook

The Western content playbook, shaped around Google search and global social platforms, tends to treat messaging as something you can localise at the end: write the master version, translate, adjust a few references. Keyword tools and A/B tests then optimise the surface.

In Russia the surface is served by other systems. Search goes largely through Yandex, social reach through VK and Telegram, and each of those places its own constraints on how much text an ad or a post can carry. Short formats leave room for one image at most. If that image is a symbol without a push, the ad reads as a caption. If it relies on a cultural code the reader does not share, it reads as noise.

So the order of work has to flip. The image is chosen for the Russian receiver first, and the wording follows. Testing starts with whether the metaphor connects at all, and only then moves to which headline variant gets the better click rate. An A/B test between two dead metaphors will still produce a winner, and that winner will still be dead.

How to check whether a metaphor will hit the target

Before choosing a metaphor for an important conversation, whether with a client, a partner or a whole market, ask whether it will enter the other person’s channel rather than whether it sounds nice.

A metaphor of mountain peaks and climbing will work for someone with personal experience of ascent and effort. For a person whose experience is built around water, currents and obstacles in the stream, the same summit may stay an outside decoration: pleasant and unconducted. The same logic scales to a market. Find out which domains of experience your buyers actually live in before you pick the image.

A practical tool here is the fast verbal reaction. A quick answer, not yet filtered by conscious thought, cuts off polite logic and leaves intuition. That gives access to the layer where tuning between two structures is possible at all. In a research interview it means asking people to respond to an image immediately, before they compose an opinion. What they blurt out tells you more than what they explain. This is part of the reason we build customer research for foreign companies around live reactions rather than questionnaires alone.

The second practical point is to avoid stopping at the image. Saying “you are at a dead end” is only a symbol, a tidy label. Asking straight after it, “if this dead end had one gap, where would it be?”, is push-pull. The question moves the mind forward, towards a search, instead of leaving it to admire an accurate description of its own stuck state. In marketing copy, the same move turns a statement of the buyer’s problem into a first step they can take.

The third point applies to how you talk to yourself. If your inner image of a hard period is only named, “this is a pit”, “this is a wall”, and everything stops there, probably only the symbol worked, without stimulation. Ask what in that pit, or behind that wall, could become the first movement, and notice whether anything inside responds to the question beyond agreement with the wording. Management teams do the same thing about a stalled market entry. “The market is closed to us” is a symbol. The useful question is where the first gap is.

What a foreign company should do

If you sell into Russia from another country, a few steps follow from all this.

Audit your core brand metaphors and ask of each one what experience it assumes in the reader. Some images rest on physical, elemental experience that crosses borders easily. Others rest on a cultural history the Russian audience does not share with you. Treat the second group as untested, however well it performs at home.

Pair every key image with a push. A slogan that only names something is a symbol. Add a question, a next step, a contrast that sets the image in motion.

Test the connection before the variant. Check with real people from the audience whether the image lands at all, using quick reactions, and only then optimise wording in the ad accounts.

Accept that some messages will need to be rebuilt rather than translated. That is ordinary work in a market with its own associations and its own reading habits.

Why the physics matters

A metaphor that stays a pretty picture changes nothing. It entertains the mind and leaves the state untouched. A metaphor carried through a well-tuned channel changes the state so clearly that you can see it from outside: in the breathing, in the pause, in the tone of what the person says next. The difference between an ornament of speech and a working tool lies less in the elegance of the phrasing than in whether current runs through it.

Frequently asked questions

Sources

• Russian version of this article on belokrylovo.ru: Метафора работает как провод под напряжением