Why buyers want someone to tell them how it is done

Millions of people every month take a test that assigns them a personality type, read a horoscope written for their sign, or look up their “destiny matrix”, a numerology chart that has become a small craze in the Russian-speaking internet. None of these systems claims rigorous evidence. Many of the people using them know that perfectly well. They come back to the test anyway.

The easy explanation is gullibility. It does not hold up, because many of these people know exactly what they are doing. The better explanation is a shortage of something much simpler than truth. What they are short of is rules.

That shortage matters to anyone who sells, and it matters in a particular way to a company that sells into Russia from abroad. This article walks through the mechanism first and the marketing consequences second.

Guilt nobody could have predicted

A modern person lives with choice that has no limits, and therefore no justification. Every decision, to buy or to refuse, gets made without an external prompt. The environment no longer tells you what is right. The result is a constant, quiet, background tension: what if I picked the wrong one?

This is what psychologists call a crisis of authenticity. It is not a dramatic event. It is a nagging doubt that follows almost every decision, from a phone plan to a career.

Out of that tension comes a request. The person is not asking for more information or for another option. They want the opposite: a figure that will shrink the field of choice to a manageable size. Developmental psychology traditionally links this work to the paternal function rather than to maternal care. Hence the name for the request, symbolic fatherhood. Nobody is asking for a literal parent. The term describes a structural need for rules.

What the symbolic father actually does

The function is easy to confuse with ordinary power or authority. It is built differently. Forbidding things for the sake of forbidding is no part of it. It does three specific jobs.

The first is narrowing the field. Out of a thousand options, one remains worth attention, and there is no need to keep reviewing the other nine hundred and ninety-nine.

The second is permission to focus. You can invest in one direction without the constant thought that somewhere else might have been better.

The third, and the most important, is removing guilt. Giving up the alternatives stops feeling like a loss, because someone with authority has already said the sacrifice is justified.

Without this figure, turning down options always hurts a little. With it, turning them down becomes a decision rather than a loss.

Why sorting systems are so attractive

This explains the pull of systems that sort people into categories: astrology, numerology, psychological typologies. What works in them is the rule, and accuracy has little to do with it. Taking a personality test means handing the question “who am I?” to an outside system for a while. Relief comes even to someone who rationally understands how arbitrary the method is. It comes from the plain fact that a category exists and does not have to be invented from scratch every day, whether or not it is true.

For a marketer this is a useful correction to a common belief. The belief says buyers want accurate information and the brand’s job is to supply it. Information is part of it. But a buyer drowning in options often responds to a clear frame more strongly than to one more accurate fact.

How the request works in communication

For anyone who tells stories, whether a brand, a mentor or a teacher, there is a practical conclusion here. An audience worn out by endless choice responds less to the breadth of an offer than to the clarity of its rules. A story that says “here are your limits, here is what you can do and what is not worth doing” works harder than a story that simply lists what is available.

That does not mean being harsh or directive for effect. The storyteller, whether expert or brand, performs the paternal function in a narrow, structural sense. It takes part of the weight of choosing onto itself, and it does so through clarity, without suppression. A good story does not leave the reader alone with a thousand possibilities. It offers a narrow, well-trodden path that can be walked without constantly checking the alternatives.

Where Russia differs from the playbook you brought

Most Western marketing advice leans the other way. It celebrates choice, personalisation and “find what works for you”. A brand is told to present options and let the customer decide. In a market where the customer already has an overwhelming number of options, that advice adds to the load the customer is trying to put down.

I will be careful here: I have no measurement showing that Russian buyers want rules more than American or German buyers do, and I would distrust anyone who claims one. What I can describe is the environment a foreign company walks into.

Choice in Russia is very wide and very flat. Large marketplaces put thousands of near-identical listings side by side. Search results on Yandex mix manufacturers, resellers, aggregators and classified ads on the same page. A buyer looking for a product or a service is handed a spreadsheet, in effect, and asked to do the sorting alone.

Into that environment arrives the typical translated site of a foreign company. It keeps the international structure: the full catalogue, every configuration, every package tier presented with equal weight. The copy is careful and neutral, because the original was written to avoid telling anyone what to do. To a buyer who is already tired of comparing, that neutrality reads as one more list. The brand had a chance to be the voice that narrows the field and passed it up.

This is a communication gap, and it sits on top of whatever psychology the buyer brings. It is also cheap to close compared with most market entry problems.

What local practice asks of a brand

Three things tend to separate brands that take the paternal role in Russia from brands that only add to the noise.

A position that excludes. The brand says who its product is for and, just as clearly, who should buy something else. That second half feels risky to a company used to maximising reach. In practice it is what gives the buyer permission to stop looking. Working out that position is the core of brand strategy, and it has to be done for the Russian market specifically, because the competitors and the alternatives are different.

A recommendation instead of a menu. If you sell five configurations, the page should say which one suits which situation, and which one most buyers in a given situation should start with. The comparison table can stay. It should come after the recommendation, as a reference for those who want it.

Rules the buyer can repeat. A clear rule travels. “Choose this if you do X, choose that if you do Y” is something a buyer can pass to a colleague or a spouse, and that is how a decision gets approved inside a household or a company. A vague promise of quality cannot be passed on.

None of this requires an aggressive tone. A brand that shouts instructions reads as pressure, and pressure costs trust. The firmness belongs in the structure of the message, while the voice can stay calm.

What to do if you sell into Russia from another country

Start by finding out how your Russian buyers actually choose: what they compare, which alternatives they consider, where they get stuck. That is a job for customer research, and it is worth doing before any copy gets rewritten, because the rules you offer have to answer the confusion buyers really have, not the one your home team assumes.

Then go through the Russian site and the ads with one question: where do we hand the buyer a list, and where do we hand them a rule? Every list is a place where the buyer is left alone with the choice.

Finally, check that the rules you give are honest. A clear, fair category helps a person. A clear, manipulative one gets found out, and in a market with active review platforms and messenger chats, it gets found out fast.

Why the pull towards rules is not weakness

The attraction to typologies, strict rule systems and mentors who say “do it this way and no other” is neither weakness nor naivety. It is a reaction to a real shortage. What people lack is structure that takes some of the decisions off their hands, and they already have plenty of information. Understanding the mechanism lets a person choose their source of rules deliberately instead of grabbing the first test or confident voice in the feed.

The same applies when you set out a position for others: colleagues, clients, your own children. Placing someone in a clear, honest category and giving them firm limits does not shrink them. It relieves them of part of an anxiety they would otherwise carry alone.

The figure people look for is a structure

The request for symbolic fatherhood is addressed to a structure more than to a specific person: let there be rules somewhere that I can lean on. Tests, horoscopes, mentors and brands with a clear position fill that role for a while. The real question behind each of those tests is simpler than it looks. The person is not asking what their birth chart says. They are asking who will tell them it is fine to stop trying everything.

A brand that answers that question honestly earns something a longer feature list cannot buy.

Frequently asked questions

Sources

• Russian version of this article on belokrylovo.ru: Почему вам хочется, чтобы кто-то сказал, как правильно