Two models of value: who should end up holding it

A person finishes a course in management accounting and leaves with a model in their head. From now on they can work out unit economics themselves, and that ability stays with them for good. Someone buying laundry detergent leaves the shop with a different feeling. They have no use for the formula of the surfactants. They want their clothes clean, and the question of how that happens is one the company has agreed to carry for them. Both purchases went through. Value in each of them lives in a different place, and mixing those places up is how you lose a client.

Where value lives: in the client or in the product

There are two ways to arrange a deal so that the client feels they received exactly what they came for.

The first is the transparent model. It is native to education, consulting and advisory work. Value is assigned to the client, who becomes its carrier. The specialist does not keep the knowledge to themselves. They hand it over, and after the deal the client walks away more capable than they arrived. A good teacher is pleased when a student outgrows them. A good consultant installs a model in the client that the client will one day use without the consultant.

The second is the narcissistic model, and the word is used here in the psychological sense, without judgement. It is native to most product and service markets. Value sits in the company, the product or the service, and the client has no wish to find out what the detergent is made of, how the insurance payout algorithm works or which architecture stands behind the app. They want it to work, and working it out is somebody else’s job. Value passes to the client differently here: through attachment to a transitional object. The product stands in for the client. They consume it while identifying with it, and at the same time they are afraid of being cheated, abandoned or short-changed. That fear is part of the deal’s structure, and everything the company says either quiets it or wakes it.

Why educating the client sometimes works against you

Putting value in the wrong place is probably the most common and least visible mistake in client work. A company on a narcissistic market decides to “educate” its customers: explain the composition, the technology, the inner logic of the product in detail, on the assumption that a better-informed client is a more loyal one. In practice the opposite happens. The client senses that they are expected to have a competence they do not have and were never supposed to have, and they retreat.

The retreat goes in one of two directions. Either towards an external norm (“that is what everyone does”, “everybody knows that”) or towards an internal one (“I just like it” or “I just don’t like it”, with no argument attached). Neither brings the client any closer to the expert position the explanation was trying to grow in them.

The contrast with the education market is instructive. There, exactly the same action, a detailed explanation, strengthens the bond, because that is what the client came for. They want to understand. They want to carry the competence away with them, and the deeper the explanation, the higher the value of the deal in their eyes. On a consumer market the same depth reads as a tiresome lecture delivered to the wrong address.

On a consumer market the client regresses, quite naturally, to a simpler and more dependent position. This is the normal state of the contact, whatever the Western inbound tradition says about it. Dragging the client upwards towards analysis and expertise is pointless. Education belongs where value is assigned to the client. It does not belong where value lives in the product and the client chose this particular deal precisely so that they would not have to deal with its internals.

Where the Western playbook comes from, and why it misfires in Russia

Most of the content marketing doctrine a foreign company brings with it was written for the transparent side of the line. The inbound school grew up around software, professional services and B2B tools, markets where the buyer genuinely wants to understand the method before committing and where a long educational blog is a legitimate sales instrument. Google rewards that kind of content, and “teach first, sell later” became a default applied to everything.

Carry that default into a Russian consumer or service market and two things go wrong at once.

The first is the mismatch described above: the buyer of a product does not want the lecture. The second is specific to Russia, and I offer it as an observation from practice rather than a measured fact. The Russian buyer’s baseline fear of being cheated is higher than in most Western markets. Years of uneven product quality, grey imports and counterfeits have taught people to expect that the explanation on the packaging and the thing inside the packaging may be two different stories. So when a company starts explaining in detail why its product works, a share of the audience hears a justification rather than a reassurance. Justification is what someone does when they have something to answer for. The detailed explanation wakes exactly the fear the transitional object was supposed to put to sleep.

This is why a Russian buyer on a narcissistic market looks for different signals than a Western one. They read reviews on Yandex Maps and on the marketplaces before they read your site. They want to know that a real person will answer in Telegram or WhatsApp within minutes and take the problem off their hands. They want the return, the warranty and the delivery date stated as promises rather than buried in terms and conditions. All of these are ways of saying “we carry the complexity, you do not have to”. None of them is an explanation of how the product works.

On the transparent side the Russian market differs too, in the opposite direction. Consulting, training and advisory work here are sold overwhelmingly through a named expert rather than through a firm’s brand. A Telegram channel where the specialist shows the method openly, week after week, does more than any corporate white paper, because the buyer is checking whether the competence is real and whether it will actually be handed over. Hiding the method behind a “book a demo” gate, a habit imported from Western SaaS marketing, reads on this market as a sign that there is little method to hide.

How to tell which of the two markets you are on

The first practical step is to decide honestly which of the two markets your product or service belongs to, in Russia specifically, since the answer can differ from the answer at home.

The sign of the transparent model is simple: the client comes for competence, and the deal succeeds at the moment when they can manage without you. The sign of the narcissistic model is equally simple: the client comes for a result and wants to know as little as possible about the mechanics of getting it. The deal succeeds at the moment when they have trusted you and can relax.

Once that is settled, the communication decision almost makes itself.

In the transparent model, invest in explanation, in handing over tools, in making the client more autonomous. Stinginess with explanation there does direct damage to the value of the deal. In the narcissistic model, invest in the transitional object instead: in how the product looks and feels, in the durability of the promise, in the calm with which the company takes the complexity onto itself. A detailed account of the composition, the algorithm or the internal kitchen does not build trust here. It erodes it, because it reminds the client of the fear of being cheated or short-changed instead of removing it.

For a company selling into Russia from abroad, this diagnosis is worth running before the site is localised and before the first advertising budget is set, because it decides what the site is for. A product site on this market needs proof that the promise holds: reviews, a responsive manager, stated guarantees, a clean and quiet page. A service site needs the expert visible and the method on display. Translating the home site and hoping it lands on the right side of the line is the expensive way to find out. Proper customer research with Russian buyers is the cheap way.

The third case: one company, both markets

The same company often runs both types of market at once. It sells a finished product and at the same time consults on how to use it. A software vendor sells licences and also runs implementation. A manufacturer sells equipment and also trains the operators.

The logic of these two contacts should not be mixed in one conversation. At the moment of buying the product, the client wants to trust and not to dig. At the moment of consultation, they want the opposite: to understand and to take the knowledge away with them. Confusing the two modes means either exhausting the client with unnecessary explanation where they wanted to trust, or cheating their expectations where they came specifically for competence.

In Russia this split shows up in a concrete way, because the two contacts usually happen in different channels. The product sale runs through a marketplace listing or a manager in a messenger, where the client wants a fast, confident, complete answer. The consulting or training side runs through the expert’s channel, a webinar or an on-site session, where the client wants depth. A foreign company that routes both through one translated corporate site, with one tone of voice, ends up serving neither well. Deciding which pages, channels and people belong to which mode is a question of brand strategy in the plain sense: what the company promises, and where value is meant to end up.

Who owns the value in the end

Value is never nobody’s. It is always in somebody’s hands. The only question is whose: the hands of the client, who was taught and released, or the hands of the company, which was trusted and in which the client remained.

A conversation with a client works when both sides know in advance where the value is going to end up, and nobody tries to deliver it to a place the client never asked to be taken. On the Russian market, where the fear of being short-changed runs closer to the surface and the expert is checked more carefully than the firm, getting that destination right is the difference between a buyer who relaxes and a buyer who quietly leaves.

Frequently asked questions

Sources

• Russian version of this article on belokrylovo.ru: Две модели управления ценностью