See the law, not the case: which of your marketing rules survive Russia

One coffee shop owner says: “This customer stopped coming because a chain opened next door.” Another looks at the same numbers and says: “I have a rule here. Once someone skips three weeks in a row, they almost never come back.” The first owner has described one case. The second has seen a law that repeats across hundreds of customers.

That difference has a heavy name, nominological thinking: the ability to lift a regularity off a specific situation, name it and use it where you used to guess. You work out how a mechanism runs once, then apply it to dozens of similar situations.

For a company selling into Russia from abroad, this skill cuts both ways. Your best marketing rules are compressed experience, and they were compressed somewhere else. Google Ads doesn’t serve advertisers targeting Russia, Meta’s platforms are banned, and buyers here reach you through Yandex, VK and Telegram. So the useful question on entering this market is which of your laws are real, and which are habits of the market you left behind.

Three ways to think about what happens in a business

There are three levels of thinking about a business. You can feel it: sales are moving today, the room has a good atmosphere, the team is in good spirits. You can explain a single case: Ivan left because a barista was rude to him on Tuesday. Or you can go one level up and say that customers leave along the same path, and here is what the path looks like, step by step.

The third level builds a rule that covers a whole class of situations. The move behind it is plain: you give a phenomenon a name and turn it into a tool. The churn law. The first-screen rule. The second-touch effect. Once an observation has a name, you can reuse it, pass it to an employee and build it into a process.

Picture a salesperson who has been hearing “too expensive” for two weeks. They can answer every objection separately, hunting for new words each time. Or they can notice that “too expensive” rarely means “I have no money”. It nearly always means “I didn’t see what I’m paying for”. Now the whole conversation is built around value instead of a discount.

The upper level stands on the two below it. Remove the lower steps and the law hangs in the air. A strong manager moves in both directions: up from a specific customer to a general rule, then straight back down to check it on the next customer. A mind that can only generalise is as helpless as one that drowns in details.

Every model you use is a frozen observation

Take any marketing tool you use daily and you will find this kind of thinking in frozen form. The sales funnel: someone noticed that people pass through the same stages on the way to buying, named the stages and drew a diagram. Customer lifetime value: someone got tired of counting revenue buyer by buyer and derived a rule for the whole base. AIDA, unit economics and the customer journey map started the same way.

A strategist works like a mathematician here, pulling one principle out of many particular cases. In four years of working in neuromarketing I have caught myself making this move many times. You see one strange result in advertising, then a similar one, and on the third you realise you are looking at a law of perception. After that you stop rediscovering it on every project.

Here is the catch for anyone crossing a border. When an observation freezes into a model, the environment it came from freezes in with it, out of sight. The diagram shows the stages. It doesn’t show the channels, the language, the habits and the rules of the market that produced them.

Where this turns into money

The most expensive mistake in advertising is optimising each campaign on its own. The owner moves budgets, swaps images, pushes bids up and down, and explains every result as a one-off: this time the creative missed, that time the audience was cold.

Someone thinking one level higher looks at all twenty campaigns at once. Often the mechanism turns up fast: inquiries come from the ads that name the customer’s pain in the customer’s own words, and the loudest promise loses. That is a law, and you can carry it into every new campaign.

In Russia this particular law has a practical edge. The customer’s own words are Russian words, and a translation of your English ad copy does not contain them. They sit in search queries, in sales calls and in the refusals your local team hears. So the first job in Yandex Ads is to read what people actually type, and the copy comes after that.

The same move works in pricing. An online school owner spent half a year adjusting prices by instinct, and sales jumped around for no visible reason. Then they put every launch into one table and saw the law. People barely bought the cheapest tier and readily bought the middle one when a clearly more expensive tier stood next to it. The expensive tier rarely sold, yet its presence pulled up the middle one. The owner called it the rule of three tiers, and now builds the line-up on purpose.

When the model is prettier than reality

Building rules is intoxicating. The diagram looks handsome, and you want to believe it more than what is happening outside the window.

I have watched this many times. A company draws a perfect customer journey map, lays out six stages, colours them in brand colours and hangs it on the wall. The living customer gets through in two steps, by a different logic altogether. The model exists and the sales don’t. A rule that has never met a live person is a hypothesis in a confident suit.

There is a simple sign that you have fallen in. You start arguing with facts on behalf of the diagram. The numbers say one thing and you answer: that’s an outlier, wrong audience, bad month. Saying it once is normal. The third time in a row, you are defending the model. Companies entering Russia have a local version of this sentence, and I would treat it as a warning: “the market isn’t ready for this yet”. Sometimes that is true. More often the market has answered, and the answer went against the slide.

Why borrowed rules are the real risk

Take a rule you apply without thinking. “Warm up first, sell later.” “A discount kills the brand.” “The first touch should be free.” Now ask where you got it.

Either it grew from your experience: you took cases apart, saw the repetition and only then named it. Or you read it in a book or heard it at a conference and adopted it straight away.

The second kind is more dangerous. Books don’t lie. The trouble is that a borrowed law was born on another audience, in another market. It worked for its author. Your conditions differ, the rule can quietly pull you the wrong way, and you will blame each failure on chance.

Entering Russia changes the sorting. A rule you earned honestly at home becomes a borrowed rule the day you cross the border, because the environment it grew in stayed behind. Here is what changes underneath it:

• Channels. A rule about how to run Google or Meta has nowhere to run. Your playbook has to be rebuilt around Yandex, VK and Telegram.
• Language and law. Since March 2026 Russian-language rules for advertising apply on top of ad labeling with erid. A habit of how fast creative ships was probably formed without that layer.
• Contact. A large share of qualified conversations here happens in messengers rather than by email, so a rule built on email follow-up describes a path many buyers never take.
• Comparison. Marketplaces and classifieds like Ozon, Wildberries and Avito put your offer beside others in a single view. “A discount kills the brand” deserves a fresh test in that setting.

None of this proves any given rule of yours wrong. It only moves each one back into the “not yet tested” pile.

What tends to travel and what doesn’t

This is my working split, an interpretation you should test like everything else here. Rules about mechanisms travel better than rules about parameters. “People judge a price against what stands next to it” is a mechanism, and I would expect the rule of three tiers to have a fair chance in Russia. The tier prices, the names and the place where the comparison happens are parameters, and those have to be found again. “Name the pain in the customer’s words” is a mechanism. The words themselves are a parameter. “Send a follow-up email on the third day” is parameters from top to bottom, with very little mechanism inside.

So strip each rule down and ask what is left once the channel, the number and the language are gone. If something remains, you have a candidate law. If nothing does, you had a local habit.

What to do if you sell into Russia from abroad

1. List the rules you run on. Write down the ten or so you apply without thinking, including the ones in your agency’s brief.
2. Mark the origin. Lived or borrowed, and if lived, where. Everything from your home market counts as borrowed for now.
3. Write the conditions. For each rule, state what must be true for it to hold: which channel, which buyer habit, which language.
4. Decide what would disprove it. Do this before the test, so a bad result can’t be renamed a bad month.
5. Test it on live Russian contact. Real traffic, real conversations, real refusals, starting with the rule your budget depends on most. A Russian market entry plan should be built on these results.
6. Promote only what comes back. Give the surviving rule a name, write it into your local team’s process, and keep checking it on the next customer.

If you can’t tell which of your rules have been tested and which were taken on faith, that is a good place to begin a review of your marketing. Unchecked assumptions are what most often hold a business in place.

A rule grown from practice saves you years. A rule borrowed and never tested costs you the same years, just as quietly. The difference is whether you took the trouble to bring the handsome diagram up against a living person, in the market where you are actually selling.

Frequently asked questions

Sources

• Russian version of this article on belokrylovo.ru: Номинологическое мышление: как видеть закон, а не случай