The script a buyer plays in every setting at once

The same person can be equally lost in a meeting, in a queue at a clinic and in a conversation with their own child. The three situations have nothing in common. The confusion is identical anyway. This is not a coincidence, and it is not a mood. It is an attitude: a master script that was written once, very early, and has been replayed ever since, wherever the person happens to end up.

For marketers this idea is uncomfortable, because most of our tools assume the opposite. We split a customer journey into stages and hand each stage to a different team. We assume the person who clicked an ad is one kind of person and the person who argues over a contract clause is another. They are the same person, running the same script, and the script does not care which department you assigned them to.

This article sets out what an attitude is, what it consists of, why it travels unchanged across roles, and what that means for a company selling into Russia from somewhere else.

An attitude forms once and then travels everywhere

In the psychological model this piece is based on, an attitude is the general script of a personality, established at early stages of development. Its defining property is that it is not tied to any particular situation. If something like a diffuse identity took shape early on, it does not stay in one context. It shows up literally everywhere: at work, in friendship, in romantic relationships, in a passing conversation with a stranger.

That explains a pattern that looks strange at first. A person can be a confident professional and still fall apart in the simplest everyday situation. The attitude does not ask how formally complex a situation is. It responds to structural resemblance: how closely the present scene echoes the scene in which the attitude was originally formed. A negotiation and an argument with a neighbour can look nothing alike on the surface and still share the same structure underneath.

For anyone who sells, this is the first practical point. The reaction you meet at a touchpoint may have very little to do with the touchpoint itself. A buyer who reads your offer as a trap may be responding to the shape of the situation, somebody wants something from them, rather than to anything you wrote.

Four components of one script

An attitude is built from four components that work at the same time and in agreement with each other.

The first is the type of game. A zero-sum game, where one side wins at the other’s expense, or a non-zero-sum game, where both win or nobody does. In other words, a cooperative or a competitive logic of interaction.

The second is the level of energy. At one pole is the hyperthymic state, where there is a lot of energy and it pushes outward. At the other are the hypothymic and dysthymic states, where there is little energy and it tends to be held inside.

The third is the type of attachment, ranging from secure to progressively less predictable forms.

The fourth is the orientation of processes, in or out: whether a person leans more towards taking or more towards giving in their basic exchange with the environment.

A person does not choose these four components consciously, and they do not exist separately. They form one configuration, which corresponds to the four quadrants of the general map of the psyche used in this model. That is why an attitude is not one character trait among many. It is the basic operating structure of a personality, and it determines how all the other parts will work.

Translated into buying behaviour, the four components become four questions any sales process answers whether it means to or not. Does this buyer think a deal means somebody loses? How much energy will they spend on the decision? How easily do they trust a counterpart they have not met? Are they here to take something, or to build something with you?

Why an attitude looks the same in every role

The key consequence is that an attitude does not switch according to social role. A person with a particular attitude shows its structural signs as a manager, as a parent and as a friend. The costume changes. The logic of the game, the level of energy, the type of attachment and the direction of taking and giving stay as they were.

This is also why changing a job, a partner or a social circle rarely changes a deep behavioural pattern on its own. The attitude moves into the new setting together with the person and starts unfolding the same script there, with a new cast.

Consider one example from the source. Take a person whose attitude is dominated by a zero-sum game and an avoidant type of attachment. At work this looks like constant competition for resources and suspicion towards colleagues, even where there is plenty of room to cooperate. In a relationship the same attitude appears as an expectation that the partner will sooner or later win at their expense, and as difficulty trusting. In a random everyday conflict, a queue or a dispute with a neighbour, the same logic flares up instantly: the situation is read automatically as one where somebody has to lose.

Three plots that look different are one script played by three different casts. Now place that person on the buying side of your deal. They will read your discount as a trick, your free trial as bait and your contract as a document written against them. None of that is about your company. All of it will land on your company.

What changes when you sell into Russia

Most of the content on this topic in English is written for Western markets, and the advice it gives assumes a particular buying environment. A few things change when the buyer sits in Russia, and a foreign company tends to meet them late.

The touchpoints are more scattered, so the script is replayed more often. A typical Russian path to purchase runs through Yandex search, a site, reviews on Yandex Maps or 2GIS, a marketplace listing where one exists, and a conversation in a messenger rather than by email. Every one of those is a separate scene. If your plan treats them separately, with the agency owning the ads, a contractor owning the site and a local partner owning the chats, then the buyer’s script meets a different tone at each step. A buyer who plays a zero-sum game notices every inconsistency and files it as evidence.

Yandex Direct cannot target an attitude. Targeting works with queries, interests, geography and behaviour on the network. It knows nothing about the game someone plays when they land on your page. The same is true of Google, but at home you often have years of brand history that does part of the reassuring for you. A foreign brand entering Russia usually arrives without that history, so the page and the first conversation carry the whole load.

A translated funnel carries your own script, too. This part is easy to miss. A company also has something like an attitude: a habitual way of treating counterparts that shaped its funnel at home. Moving that funnel into a new market is changing the scenery. The script, whether it is pushy, cautious, generous or guarded, comes along unchanged. If your home process assumes a buyer who trusts easily and decides quickly, it will meet a different script here and read the mismatch as a bad market.

None of this means Russian buyers share one attitude. The source says nothing of the kind, and I would not claim it. It means the environment gives any given script more scenes in which to show itself, and gives a foreign company fewer tools to soften the first impression.

What to do with this in practice

The practical conclusion in the source is direct. Changing only the scenery is useless if the problem sits in the attitude itself: it will show itself again on new material. It is more productive to work directly with one of the four components, because changing even one of them changes the whole configuration at once, in every setting at the same time.

For a company this translates into a few steps.

First, look for repetition across unrelated contexts. If the same objection appears in search ad comments, in messenger conversations and at the negotiating table, you are not dealing with a reaction to one channel. The source makes this point about observing people in general: a pattern repeated across unrelated contexts is a reliable sign that you are seeing an attitude and not a situational reaction.

Second, stop answering the pattern as if it were a one-off. A suspicious buyer handled with a one-time discount will simply become suspicious of the discount. A structural pattern calls for a structural answer: guarantees that are visible before the first contact, terms written in plain language, one consistent tone from the ad to the invoice.

Third, pick the component you can influence. You cannot change a buyer’s attachment history, but you can design a first contact that does not demand instant trust. You cannot turn a zero-sum player into a cooperative one, but you can frame the offer so the gain on their side is obvious and does not look like your loss. A low-energy buyer needs fewer steps. A buyer oriented towards taking needs to see what they get before they are asked to give anything.

Fourth, before you blame the channel, check your own script. If your team treats every Russian prospect as a risk to be managed, the buyer will meet that stance at every step, and their own script will answer it.

One script, a thousand scenes

An attitude does not ask permission before walking onto the next stage. It simply walks on, in an office, in a queue, in a conversation with a child, and plays the same part, because it has not learned another one yet. The same happens on the other side of a sale. Recognising a script by its repeated signs across very different situations is half of the way to rewriting even one of its scenes someday. For a company entering a new market, that recognition is cheaper than rebuilding the channel mix and more useful than another round of creative.

Frequently asked questions

Sources

• Russian version of this article on belokrylovo.ru: Сценарий, который вы играете во всех декорациях сразу