"The Kremlin said": how metonymy differs from metaphor, and why it trips foreign marketers in Russia

“The Kremlin said.” “The White House reacted.” “The street demands change.” Buildings and pavements cannot speak and cannot demand. Yet the phrases sound natural, and nobody stumbles over them, because a mechanism is at work that differs from metaphor in almost everything except one thing: it also transfers meaning from one object to another.

That mechanism is called metonymy. Confusing it with metaphor means losing an important distinction in the very structure of figurative thinking. For a company that sells into Russia from abroad, it also means something more concrete: a message that was carefully translated and still lands on the wrong whole, or on nothing at all.

How metonymy differs from metaphor

Metonymy keeps the context and changes an element inside it. A part replaces the whole, a container replaces its contents, an instrument replaces the person who uses it. “The Kremlin” instead of “the country’s leadership” is metonymy: the building stayed in the same context of power and simply took the place of the people inside it.

Metaphor is built differently. It is a whole structural transfer, an image that carries meaning from one domain into a completely different one, outside the original context. Metonymy stays inside a single context and is therefore associative. There may be no logical connection at all between the whole and the part. The part was chosen because it happened to be nearby, visible or convenient as a label, and for no other reason. It does not resemble the whole structurally.

This leads to a practical consequence: a metaphor can be predicted from its structure, and a metonymy cannot. If you know the structure of an image, an enclosed space, an ascent, a flowing current, you can guess with high probability which associations it will trigger in most people. Metaphor rests on stable, largely universal structural correspondences. Metonymy is unpredictable precisely because its link is contextual, often accidental, and depends on the history and habits of a specific group of people who have agreed to call a thing by that name.

For a marketer this is the whole problem in one sentence. A metaphor can be tested against human experience in general. A metonymy can only be tested against the people who use it.

Metaphor and metonymy in everyday speech about work

The difference shows clearly in how people talk about their jobs. “Our team is like climbers roped together” is a metaphor: it borrows from a completely different domain, mountains, risk, mutual dependence, and uses that structure to explain relationships inside the team. “The director’s office is unhappy” is metonymy: the office stays in the same context, the director’s place of work, and stands in for the director because that is how people have long spoken, without any structural analogy between a room and a person.

Russian business speech is dense with this second kind. The accounting department will not let it through, where бухгалтерия means the people who sign off expenses and, by extension, the rules they enforce. The first person, первое лицо, where a position in a list stands for the owner or chief executive whose nod decides everything. Beyond the ring road, за МКАДом, where a Moscow motorway stands for the entire rest of the country and carries a whole attitude towards it. None of these are metaphors. Nothing is being compared to anything. A piece of the situation has been picked up and used as a handle for the whole situation, and the choice of piece is history, not logic.

There is also a pattern tied to how close an image sits to the natural world. The nearer an image is to natural, archaic motifs, rivers, trees, animals, the more predictable the metaphor: it rests on bodily and natural experience shared by almost everyone. The further the image moves into the cultural field, into specific brands, local realities and professional jargon, the harder and less predictable both figures become, metonymy especially, because the link no longer holds on a universal structure. It holds on a local context that far from everyone shares.

That is why a Western brand’s river or mountain usually survives the trip to Russia, and its Silicon Valley or Main Street usually does not. Those are metonymies: a whole named through a place that only means something if you grew up hearing it used that way.

When to trust a guess about what an image means

The distinction tells you when to trust an intuitive reading of an image and when to ask directly. If someone uses a metaphor built on an archaic, natural motif, a river, a mountain, a storm, you can assume the general direction of meaning with reasonable confidence, because the structure of such a metaphor is stable and predictable for almost any person. If they use a metonymy, naming a whole through a part that belongs to their personal or professional context, guessing is risky. What self-evidently stands for the intended meaning in their head may be entirely opaque to an outsider, because the link rests on shared experience the listener may not have.

In customer interviews with Russian buyers this is where foreign teams lose the most. The buyer says the purchase was blocked by безопасники, “the security people”, and a foreign interviewer hears a department. A local hears a whole approval culture, a predictable set of objections and a predictable timeline. The buyer says a competitor is “from Rublyovka”, and the interviewer notes a suburb. A local hears a price bracket, a style and an audience. The words were translated correctly. The whole they pointed at was not. This is the gap that proper customer research for the Russian market exists to close: the interviewer’s job is to make the respondent unpack the part until the whole is visible.

The same logic applies when you choose images for an important conversation. A metaphor built on shared, natural material is likely to be understood even without explanation. A metonymy that leans on a narrow local context or office slang risks being misread if the other side does not share that context. In high-stakes communication it should either be decoded on the spot or avoided altogether.

Why this hits companies entering Russia harder than it hits Google-market brands

A company that grew up in English-speaking markets has usually learned to manage metaphor. Brand platforms and creative briefs talk about imagery, and a good localisation agency knows how to swap a baseball metaphor for a football one. What the briefs almost never contain is a plan for metonymy, because in the home market metonymy is invisible. Everyone shares the context, so nobody notices they are speaking in parts.

Entering Russia strips that invisibility away in two directions at once.

In the outbound direction, the brand’s own metonymies stop working. “Headquarters decided” assumes the reader pictures a corporate centre the way the brand does. “Our Berlin team” assumes Berlin stands for something. For a Russian buyer those places are empty containers. The translation is accurate and the sentence is dead.

In the inbound direction, the buyer’s metonymies arrive unread. Russian everyday and professional speech leans on shorthand built from local geography, administrative habits and the physical layout of Moscow. The brand’s research team reads the transcript, sees a list of places and departments, and files them as details. The meaning was in exactly those details.

Metaphor is the part of localisation a translator can do. Metonymy is the part that needs someone who shares the context, or research designed to extract it. That difference is why I treat the language layer as a research question in any brand strategy for the Russian market rather than as a copy task handed over at the end.

What local practice requires

The Russian market does not punish foreign brands for using metaphors. It punishes them for using metonymies they do not understand, and for failing to hear the ones the buyer uses. From that follows a short, concrete set of habits.

Separate the two figures in every piece of copy before translating it. Mark each image as metaphor or metonymy. Metaphors go to the translator with a note on which structure must survive. Metonymies go to a native reviewer with a different question: does this part point at any whole for a Russian reader, and if so, which one?

Collect the buyer’s metonymies as data, not colour. In interviews, every time a respondent names a place, a department or an object instead of a process or a person, stop and ask what it stands for. Those answers map how the category is structured in the buyer’s head, and that map rarely matches the product manager’s category tree.

Check search demand for the shorthand layer. Russian buyers type the part, not the dictionary name. A keyword set translated from English covers the formal layer of demand and misses the metonymic layer, where people search by the place they buy or the department that signs. Yandex Wordstat and your own search-query reports in Yandex Direct show that layer plainly if you look for it.

Use a local metonymy only where you have proof of the shared context. A well-aimed metonymy is a membership signal: this brand speaks like us. Aimed at the wrong group it reads as an outsider in costume. Keep it for narrow segments where research has shown the code is shared, and keep the main message on metaphors and plain statements.

Decode before you decide. When a Russian partner, distributor or client explains a refusal in metonymies, do not act on the literal part. Ask what the whole is. The accounting department, the first person, the security people are each shorthand for a decision process, and the process is what you need to work with.

Why not to confuse metaphor with metonymy

Both figures transfer meaning, and both are easy to mistake for each other by ear. Yet metaphor is structural and predictable, while metonymy is contextual and bound to a specific, often local history. Whoever confuses them risks one of two mistakes. They either overcomplicate a simple substitution of part for whole by searching for a deep analogy that is not there, or they flatten a complex structural transfer into a random association it never was.

For a company selling into Russia from another country both mistakes have prices. The first sends a team hunting for brand meaning in a local label. The second lets a precise image leave the room as noise. The cure is the same in both cases: ask which mechanism is running before you decide what the phrase means, and when it is metonymy, find the people who share the context, because nothing in the phrase itself will tell you.

Frequently asked questions

Sources

• Russian version of this article on belokrylovo.ru: «Кремль заявил»: чем метонимия отличается от метафоры