The mind does not describe the world with metaphors: it is made of them

Say that two people have a warm relationship and you have just measured closeness with temperature. There is no thermometer, the relationship does not heat up or cool down by a single physical degree, and yet the phrase is understood instantly and in almost the same way by everyone who hears it. The mind long ago got used to assembling the intangible out of sensations of the body.

Metaphor is usually treated as decoration: a seasoning for speech, pleasant to have, and the meaning would survive perfectly well without it. Look more closely and the relationship turns out to run the other way.

This matters for anyone who sells, and it matters more when you sell into a market whose language you do not speak. The images your buyers use are where their decisions start.

Why metaphor is the ground floor of thinking

Metaphor is not a stylistic device, and it is not a linguistic construction added on top of “real” thinking to make it prettier. It is how the mind is built and how it works. Through metaphor a person models the world, themselves, their relationships, their principles and values. This is meant literally. The mind has no other way to gather a complex, abstract reality into something it can survey.

Take any abstraction you discuss every day: time, relationships, a career, your own self. None of them has a shape you can touch. And yet people say with full confidence that time “flies” or “drags”, that a relationship is “solid” or “coming apart at the seams”, that a career is “going uphill”, that something inside them is “pressing down” or has “let go”. Every one of these words is borrowed from the world of bodies, space and physical processes. That borrowing is what makes the abstraction thinkable at all.

This is neither an accident of speech nor a poverty of language. It is the only route the mind has to the complex: take something concrete, bodily and already mastered, and use it to model what cannot be touched on its own. Children and adults, different cultures and different eras all walk this route, because there is no other road to abstraction.

From this follows the whole structure of working with metaphor. An image has a design that can be taken apart, beyond the mood it creates. That is not a poetic liberty on the analyst’s part. It is a description of a mechanism already running in every person, usually without their noticing.

Listening to the images as well as the words

If metaphor is a basic operation of thinking and not ornament, there is a practical conclusion. It makes sense to listen to what a person says and also to the images through which they assemble what they say.

When someone describes their job as a swamp rather than as a race, they are pointing at the structure of the experience: speed, viscosity, the sense that there is no way out. When a person says “I’m stuck” rather than “I’m tired”, you are not hearing a synonym for fatigue. You are hearing a different metaphor altogether: stillness inside a space that has no door. Dealing with fatigue and dealing with being stuck are different tasks, even though the complaint can sound similar.

The same holds in the other direction, when you choose words for yourself or for someone else. Calling a hard period a “trial” and calling it a “wreck” are not the same thing said more or less elegantly. They are two different worlds you invite yourself to live in. In one there is a way out and someone who is being tested. In the other there is only debris. The metaphor you use for a situation does not sum up what has already happened. It sets what happens next, because the next decisions are made inside it.

Why this is a commercial question

There is a temptation to wave this away: people talk however they talk, what counts is what they do. But the metaphor is exactly what determines what a person will do. Before making a decision, they have already seen the situation through a particular image, and that image has narrowed or widened the field of possible actions long before logic switched on.

For a business this has a direct consequence. A buyer who describes their problem as being stuck is looking for a door. A buyer who describes the same problem as running out of breath is looking for rest or relief. Your offer may be identical in both cases, but the words that make it feel relevant are different. If your copy answers a metaphor the buyer does not hold, the message arrives on the wrong channel, however accurate the facts in it are. This is why I start brand strategy work with how customers talk before deciding what the company should say.

Where the Russian market differs

Most foreign companies enter Russia with marketing that was written in English, tested on an English-speaking audience, and then translated. The facts survive translation reasonably well. The images often do not.

Some bodily metaphors are shared across languages. Warmth for closeness works in Russian as it does in English: тёплые отношения means what you expect. Others shift. The Russian болото, a swamp, is an everyday way to describe a stagnant workplace or a dead-end situation, and it carries the viscosity and the lack of exit described above. An English speaker reaching for a comparable image might say “rut” or “treadmill”, which have different structures: a groove you can climb out of, a machine that keeps you moving without progress. A translator who renders the meaning neutrally loses the structure entirely, and the copy that results answers nobody’s image.

The practical difference from working with Google and the English-speaking market is mostly in where the evidence comes from. On a Western project you can often lean on existing research, published customer language and your own historical data. Entering Russia, you usually have none of that in the original language. The research that would tell you how buyers frame the problem has to be done here, in Russian, and kept in Russian until the analysis is finished.

Three things local practice requires that a translated approach tends to skip:

1. Original-language sources. Interviews, sales conversations, messenger chats and reviews have to be read in Russian. A translated summary is a second author’s rewrite, and the imagery is the first thing a translator smooths away.
2. Search queries as a record of framing. The wording of queries in Yandex is one of the few places where buyers describe their problem in their own words before any seller has shaped them. Read it for images as well as for volume.
3. A native reader on the copy. Grammatical correctness is the minimum. The question to ask a native reader is whether the image in a headline feels like something a buyer would say, or like something a foreign brand would say.

What to do if you sell into Russia from abroad

If you are planning a launch or already running campaigns, here is a short route.

1. List the metaphors in your current copy. Headlines, the first screen of the site, the ad texts. Write down the image behind each: journey, fight, growth, opening doors, building. These are your hypotheses, not facts about the market.
2. Collect Russian buyer speech. A handful of recorded conversations with real customers or prospects, in Russian, about the problem before the product. Do not ask about your offer yet. Ask how the situation feels and what it is like.
3. Mark the images they use. Not the topics, the images. Is the problem a weight, a wall, a fog, a swamp, a leak? Note where several people reach for the same structure.
4. Compare the two lists. Where your copy and the buyers share an image, keep it. Where they differ, the buyer’s image wins, because their decisions are already being made inside it.
5. Rewrite from the buyer’s image outward. The headline names the situation the way they would. The offer answers the structure of that image: a door for someone stuck, relief for someone carrying a weight.

None of this requires a large budget. It requires reading the original material yourself or with someone who reads Russian closely, and resisting the urge to treat a fluent translation as finished work.

The structure underneath

Later in this series the discussion of metaphor moves away from pretty comparisons toward the structure of a signal. A metaphor has amplitude and form, composition and predicates, layers and censorship between them. It is a mechanism that can be taken apart, understood and, where needed, carefully retuned, the way you would treat a communication channel rather than a stray turn of phrase.

That is the frame worth keeping. A metaphor does not describe what is already in a person’s head. It is the material from which the head assembles the world, and that assembly happens long before words about facts and causes enter the conversation. A company that wants to be heard in Russia has to meet buyers at that earlier point, in their language and in their images, and build the rest of the message from there.

Frequently asked questions

Sources

• Russian version of this article on belokrylovo.ru: Психика не описывает мир метафорами: она из них состоит