Metaphor unites and divides with equal force

A disagreement about facts has an exit. Someone produces a document, a figure, a record, and the argument closes. A disagreement about whose picture of the world is correct has no exit at all, because the subject is not a fact: it is who each side feels themselves to be. That is why value conflicts smoulder for decades in places where a factual dispute would have been settled in an afternoon.

Metaphor has depth, and that depth is a double-edged instrument. The stronger an image can bind a person to something larger than themselves, the more completely it can set people against each other. Everyone who sells with images, which means every brand, is holding that instrument whether they notice it or not.

The depth that binds is the depth that splits

The more metaphorical a message is, the deeper the identification it produces, and the more serious the change it can work in the person receiving it. The suggestive part of a metaphor does not address self-awareness, the part of the mind that filters and grades incoming claims. It reaches past the censor to a less fragmented version of the person. That is why a deep image can shift a state where direct rational persuasion is powerless: it walks around the filter that would otherwise reject a new idea as foreign matter.

The same property carries the opposite risk. The higher the metaphorical level of an address, the worse the collision when it fails to correspond: when the image sent by one person does not match the structure of the other, or contradicts it outright.

Factual thinking diversifies conflict. On concrete, particular levels, disagreements stay local and can be settled one at a time. Metaphorical thinking concentrates conflict. The collision no longer happens around a single fact, it happens around an entire view of the world at once. Ideologies and religious wars come from exactly there, and the sides cannot come to terms because the object of the dispute is the structure through which each of them sees everything else.

Why argument loses a value argument

There is no deep identity without metaphor. A person cannot feel themselves part of something larger through a dry list of facts, only through an image or a symbol that resonates at a level rational argument never reaches. And that same level is where wars of worldview are born: where two people or two groups hold incompatible images of themselves and of the world, ordinary compromise is unavailable, because conceding the point means conceding a piece of identity.

This is why value disputes so rarely end with somebody changing their mind under the weight of evidence. An argument works at the level of a concept: a specific, localised fact. A value dispute runs at the level of metaphor: a broad, identifying image of the self and the world. Handing a fact to a person whose position rests on an image is like handing a receipt to someone arguing about the meaning of their own life. Formally correct, aimed at the wrong thing.

An attempt to out-argue someone in a value conflict almost always fails, and it usually sharpens the conflict as well. The person receives it as an attack on the identifying metaphor they are defending with their whole being rather than with reason alone.

Commercially this shows up every week. A buyer refuses on image, the seller answers with a comparison table, and the refusal gets firmer. Nothing in the table was wrong. It was addressed to a layer where the decision was not being made.

Reading the level before you answer

Before entering an argument, work out which level it is actually running on.

If the dispute is about a specific figure or a date, it is the level of concepts, and data and argument do their work there. If the dispute is really about what the world ought to be like, or about who the other person is, it is the level of metaphor, and factual argument is close to useless: it does not touch the layer where the struggle is happening.

In that situation the productive move is not to step on the other side’s identifying image head on. It is to look for a point of correspondence: a shared element present in both images, however far apart the rest of them are. A conversation that opens with a search for common ground rather than with proof of error turns into concentrated conflict far less often, because identity is not placed on the table as the stake.

The same holds outside work. Conflicts that fail to burn out for years and look wildly out of proportion to their occasion are usually held up by a collision of deep images of the self and the other, not by the facts on the surface. Noticing that means dropping the question of who is right and picking up the question of which pictures of themselves each side is defending.

Where a foreign brand steps on this in Russia

Every entry story carries a metaphor inside it, and most of them are never examined. “We bring world-class practice to your market” is not a description of a product. It is an image, and it casts the buyer in a role: behind, in need of instruction. The addressee hears the role before they hear the offer, and once the role is refused, the argument is over and the specification never gets read.

There is a mechanical reason foreign teams miss this. In a home market the brand metaphor arrives pre-installed. Years of presence, press, hiring, conference stages and colleagues who already use the product put the image in place long before a buyer reaches the site, and the page only has to confirm what is already known. In Russia none of that history exists for you. The image is read cold, from one page, in a market that has its own memory of how companies from your country behaved here and how the last several arrivals spoke.

Two practical consequences follow.

The first concerns where the work happens. Paid search operates at the level of concepts: a query is a concept, an ad answers it, and the whole account machinery in Yandex Direct is built around matching one to the other. The identifying image lives somewhere else, on the site, in the story about the company, in the words chosen for the offer. So an account can be assembled faultlessly and still deliver refusals, because the refusal is happening a layer above the auction. Teams used to Google Ads reporting tend to look for the cause inside the account, since that is where the reporting looks, and the cause is sitting on the landing page instead.

The second concerns claims. The reflex answer to an image problem is a louder claim about being the leading or the best supplier. In Russia that route is narrow by regulation as well as by psychology: advertising law treats superlatives as factual statements, and Yandex moderation asks for documentary proof before such wording runs. What passes as ordinary enthusiasm in an English-language campaign gets returned here for evidence. The restriction is a favour in disguise, because the superlative was going to lose the value argument anyway.

What local practice asks of you

Start from the buyer’s language rather than from a translation of your own. Search data will tell you what people ask for, in what wording and at what scale, and that is concept-level information: valuable, cheap, and silent about identity. The image comes from places where people speak in their own words: sales recordings, messenger threads, the objections that arrive before anyone mentions price.

Then look for a point of correspondence instead of a replacement. A brand entering Russia rarely needs to overwrite the buyer’s picture of themselves, and rarely manages it. What works is finding the element your image and theirs already share, and building the offer on that element. This is the whole substance of brand strategy for a market where you have no installed history, and it precedes any decision about channels or budgets in a market entry plan.

Last, audit your Russian materials with one question in hand: does this sentence describe the product, or does it quietly describe the buyer as someone who has been doing it wrong until now. Translated slogans are the usual offenders, because a literal translation preserves the words and loses the image they carried at home.

Why any of this is worth remembering

A deep metaphor gives a person something no fact will ever give: a sense of wholeness and meaning. The same metaphor can drive people into irreconcilable opposition where a dispute about facts would long ago have ended in compromise.

Whoever can tell a factual argument from a metaphorical one wastes less effort supplying evidence in places that call for a search for common ground, and is less often surprised when obvious reasoning fails to move anyone. In a market you are entering as a stranger, that distinction is worth more than another round of proof.

Frequently asked questions

Sources

• Russian version of this article on belokrylovo.ru: Метафора объединяет и разрушает с одинаковой силой