Why "the customer isn't motivated" explains nothing

A customer reached the cart, added a product and left. The marketer writes in the report: “low purchase motivation”. It sounds intelligent, and there is nothing you can do with it. A systems approach to behaviour changes the wording itself, and with the new wording comes something the old one lacked: a concrete button you can press.

Textbook words like “willpower”, “motivation” and “awareness” sound fine in a meeting and are useless at the till. Below is what to replace them with, so that instead of a verdict on a person you get a list of actions for tomorrow. For a company selling into Russia from abroad this matters more than at home: the resistance in a Russian funnel is often built in by the seller, and it stays invisible while the report blames the buyer.

What is wrong with “motivation” and “awareness”

Picture a mechanic who opens the bonnet and says: “The car is in a bad mood.” You are paying him to name a part. A valve, a spark plug, a sensor. Something you can touch, replace and test.

Classical psychology describes people with words you cannot touch. “He is not motivated.” “She lacks willpower.” Each feels like an explanation, and none tells you what to do with your hands.

A head of sales announces: “The managers have no motivation.” Fine. What will you do tomorrow morning? Buy some motivation? Pour it into a glass? The word is there, the lever is missing. It closes the conversation where it should open one.

Such words cannot be measured: motivation has no scale the way temperature does. They cannot be passed on: I say “willpower”, you hear one thing, your partner another. And they only fit a person: nobody says an ad campaign has weak willpower. Yet behaviour around an ad, in a shop or on a site follows things that can be counted. Explaining a sales slump by “buyer psychology” is discussing the car’s mood. Moods do not get repaired.

Looking at behaviour as a system

There is another language, borrowed from engineering and the science of managing complex processes. It describes behaviour through movement: where the flow goes, where it gets stuck, how much strength a person has and what it is spent on.

Four plain words replace the whole vocabulary of motivation.

Channel. The path a person travels towards a goal. The road from “saw the product” to “paid”. That road has a width, turns and potholes.

Resistance. Everything that makes the channel harder to travel. An extra step in checkout. A form with fifteen fields. A demand to register before the price is shown. Every obstacle takes some strength.

Energy. The stock of readiness the person arrived with. It is limited. On payday morning there is more of it, after an evening argument with the boss there is less. Every step on the site spends some.

Threshold. The line past which the person breaks off and leaves. While strength lasts, they keep going. If strength runs out before the road does, they close the tab.

Now put it together. The customer did not abandon the cart because they were “unmotivated”. They abandoned it because the resistance in the channel turned out to be greater than their stock of energy. They ran out on the step “enter your card details by hand”, one step short of the “pay” button.

The difference is not in how elegant the words are. The difference is that the second description shows at once where to repair.

How this changes business decisions

Take a live situation. An online shop, conversion to payment is falling. Two ways to describe the same thing.

The psychological way: “The audience is cold, trust in the brand is low, people are not ready to buy.” What do you do? Warm the audience up for months? Build trust in the abstract? The task dissolves.

The systems way: “There are seven steps to payment, three of them unnecessary. Registration before the price cuts off half the visitors. Entering a card with no saved details takes the last strength from those who made it that far.” What do you do? Remove registration, cut seven steps to three, add one-tap payment. Each action can be done within a week. The second description is not smarter. It points at the places to put your hands.

Registration before the price asks for payment in advance: give us your email and a password, and for now you get nothing back. Manual card entry hits those who reached the very end, after the decision was made. They wanted to pay, and you made them copy sixteen digits from a piece of plastic. Each detail looks trivial alone. Together they are the resistance the readiness to buy breaks against.

Where foreign sellers build resistance without seeing it

This is where the Russian market differs from the one most Western playbooks were written for. Resistance is always measured against what the buyer expects, and Russian buyers expect a different checkout.

Cards issued abroad do not work in Russia, and Apple Pay and Google Pay stopped working with Russian cards. A checkout that offers an international card form as the main route puts a wall on the last step. Local buyers pay with Mir cards, through the Faster Payments System by QR code, or with bank and platform wallets. Login is usually by phone number and an SMS code, often through Yandex ID or VK ID, and a demand to create an account with a password reads as an extra step. Marketplaces have taught people to expect delivery to a pickup point chosen on a map, so a form with address lines, a state field and a ZIP code that rejects a Russian postcode format spends energy for nothing. Many buyers would rather write to the seller in a messenger than fill in a form at all, and if the only contact route is a form, part of the flow never shows up as a lead.

None of this is psychology. A foreign company reading its Russian analytics is tempted to conclude that “Russian buyers distrust foreign brands”. Sometimes that is true. Often the flow is hitting a step copied from the home site and never adapted to local habits. Check that before you rewrite the positioning.

Measurement differs too. In place of Google Analytics, the working tool in Russia is Yandex Metrica: goal funnels, plus Webvisor recordings of what a person did on the step where they left.

The same move for ads and brand

“The ad does not grab people” sounds like a sentence passed. Translate it: “the first line takes effort to understand, and the person leaves before reaching the offer.” Resistance in the first second of contact is too high, so fix the first line. If your problem really is traffic and ad copy, the mechanics are covered separately on the page about Yandex Ads.

“People do not remember us” becomes “at first contact we send too many signals at once, and none of them sticks.” The question becomes which single image the person takes away. That is the territory of brand strategy.

The translation rule: from label to lever

An exercise I give in reviews: take any “psychological” complaint from your business and ask where in the process the flow breaks.

“The customer is not motivated to buy” becomes “resistance on the path to purchase is greater than the customer’s stock of energy”. Lever: remove extra steps.

“The employee has burned out” becomes “the load has stayed above the threshold too long”. Lever: take load off or allow recovery, instead of a lecture on balance.

“The audience does not trust the brand” becomes “there are fewer signals confirming the promise than doubts”. Lever: add concrete proof exactly where the doubt appears.

“People do not read the newsletter” becomes “opening the email costs more effort than the value expected inside”. Lever: raise the value in the subject line or send less often.

On the left sits a diagnosis of a person you can do nothing about. On the right sits a place in the process you can walk up to with a screwdriver. It works because behaviour at the moment of choice is simpler than it looks: a person moves towards a goal while strength lasts and turns off when obstacles outweigh readiness. The words about will and awareness are a superstructure invented after the fact.

Where this approach stops working

The systems view is strong where behaviour runs as a flow: the path to purchase, the reaction to an ad, movement through a site. It is weaker on deep personal meaning: why someone wants this particular car and not another, where the goal itself came from. Those are questions of values, and channels and thresholds will not close them.

So this is a second tool, not a replacement for what you know about people. When the problem sounds like “he does not want to”, check the mechanics first: perhaps he wants to, and the path is too heavy. Dig into meaning only if the mechanics are clean and the person still does not come. Most failures in sales and advertising are cured at the level of mechanics, because it is cheaper and faster there. Removing three steps from checkout is easier than rebuilding an audience’s values.

Why are psychological labels so popular? Because a label removes responsibility. If the customer is “unmotivated”, the customer is to blame, not our clumsy process. The systems language is uncomfortable for the same reason: it points at the process you built. A useful discomfort, because your own process can be rebuilt and another person’s character cannot.

Where to start tomorrow

Take one process that is sagging. Checkout, a lead form, responses to a mailing. Anything where people leave before the end.

Describe it step by step instead of with “customers are not ready”. How many actions from start to finish. Where the person first meets friction: an extra field, an unclear button, a demand they did not expect. Which step loses the most people. A configured funnel shows that in five minutes; without one, build it first, or you will be repairing at random.

Remove or simplify the heaviest step. One step, or you will not know what worked. Measure the change over at least a couple of weeks, then take the next one. One node at a time, you will see where the customer path was losing strength.

The customer is never simply “unmotivated”. They are tired at the third unnecessary step. And that step you can remove today, before you finish your coffee.

Frequently asked questions

Sources

• Russian version of this article on belokrylovo.ru: Почему «он не мотивирован» ничего не объясняет