What a customer looks for in a story

In a crowded shopping centre you can move so that almost nobody registers you. You keep your eyes off other people’s paths, stay outside their field of attention, and slide past without leaving a mark. You can also move the other way, deliberately crossing someone’s line so that a collision happens. Both options are open to every person in that crowd. The choice between them says more about a customer than any preference survey will.

Ask what a person is looking for in a story and the answer comes in three layers. They hold in any story: an advertisement, a brand, a novel. And for a company selling into Russia from abroad, each of the three fails in its own specific way, usually without anyone noticing which layer broke.

The first request: a cohort that takes the anxiety down

The first thing a person looks for in a story is reinforcement of their own identity through belonging to a group, a cohort of people like them. The question being asked is not “what should I buy”. It sits deeper: which category of people do I belong to, and does that category have a place in the world.

If the story is built so that a person can put themselves inside it, recognise their own psychological type in a character, their own life situation, their own kind, the level of anxiety drops noticeably. This happens for a reason worth stating precisely. It is not that the person has learned anything new about themselves. It is that a ready-made box exists into which their personality fits neatly, and the existence of the box is itself a relief. Individuality stays a declaration in the meantime. The person goes on talking about how unique they are, while the actual calming comes from categorisation, from the fact that somewhere it has already been settled who they are.

This is the layer a translated story loses first. A cohort is assembled out of recognisable material: the shape of a working day, the way money gets discussed, who is in the room when a decision is made, what a weekend looks like. A global brand story carries the cohort of the market it was written in. A Russian reader follows every word of the translation and still cannot climb inside, because the furniture is foreign. The text reads as competent. It produces nothing.

There is a distribution problem stacked on top of it. Cohorts in Russia assemble in places a foreign marketing team rarely watches: Telegram channels and their comment threads, VK communities, professional chats where a few hundred people in one industry talk daily. Facebook and Instagram advertising has not been available here since 2022, which means the mechanisms a Western brand normally uses to find and reinforce a cohort are not in the toolkit. The cohort still exists. It gathers somewhere you are not looking.

The second request: permission to stop holding yourself up alone

The second request is subtler and much less obvious: relief from the weight of holding up your own individuality.

Back to the shopping centre, because the observation there is exact. Moving so as to stay out of other people’s sightlines and off their invisible paths, a person becomes nearly invisible to them. No attention, no reaction, just gliding past. Cross someone’s trajectory on purpose and the opposite happens: a collision, a flash of attention, a moment when individuality suddenly becomes visible and demands a response.

That simple observation opens onto something general. Keeping your own individuality visible, separate and recognisable is genuinely tiring. Being someone specific all the time, for everyone around you, takes continuous effort. So people are willing to hand part of their authenticity to an external system: a brand, a movement, a public figure, for the plain reason that holding it up alone is harder than it looks from outside. Behind this sits an almost literal request addressed to the story: decide for me who I should be, at least partly.

A brand that accepts this request offers a frame. Here is what we hold to, here is what we refuse, here is what a person like you does in a situation like this. The frame has to be firm enough to lean on. Hedged, committee-written positioning takes nothing off anyone, because there is nothing there to lean against.

For a company entering Russia the second layer has a practical form: the buyer wants someone to carry the decision with them. This is why a step-by-step walkthrough, a named person who answers in a messenger, and a published position on how you work tend to move things here more than a generic promise of quality. The request is for a ready, reliable frame, and the frame is far easier to feel than to read.

The third request: proof that my own story is real

The third request concerns neither belonging nor relief. It is more personal: authenticity. The word needs a precise definition, because the everyday one points elsewhere. Authenticity here is not about the truthfulness of the object, not about whether the thing was really made the way it claims. Authenticity is the guarantor of a person’s own story, the anchor confirming that their “I” runs continuously through time.

The clearest example is the favourite item worn for years, battered, long past its shop gloss, and still not replaced. Its value has nothing to do with its material qualities, because a new version is almost always objectively better on specification. Its value is that it is a witness to lived time, evidence that the person who put it on five years ago and the person putting it on now are the same one, rather than a random succession of circumstances. This is precisely why a brand is under no obligation to be authentic in the strict sense. It is enough that it manages to embed itself in the customer’s personal history, to become part of their continuity.

Here Russia differs from every market a foreign company is likely to be comparing it with, and the difference is not a matter of degree. Over the past few years a large number of international brands left, went silent, changed owner, or returned under another name. From the boardroom that was a decision about a market. From the customer’s side it was a break in a personal line. The clothes in the wardrobe, the car in the yard, the software on the laptop stopped confirming their continuity. Objects that had been anchors turned into reminders that the anchor can be pulled up by someone else.

A Western brand reads the consequence as caution about quality or price. It is neither. When a Russian buyer asks whether you are here for the long run, whether service will exist in two years, whether the account will still be theirs, they are asking the third question: can I safely build you into my own story, or will you break it again. No amount of storytelling craft substitutes for an answer. Stated terms of presence, a Russian legal entity, local support, a warranty someone can actually honour, a history you are willing to name including the awkward parts: these are the material the third layer is built from. This is also why I treat brand strategy for this market as work on obligations rather than work on wording.

Three layers are a sum, not a menu

These three requests are worth seeing as layers acting at once, rather than as options to pick from. A person responding to a story is simultaneously looking for the cohort they belong to, for relief from constantly holding up their uniqueness, and for confirmation that their personal line of life has been neither cut nor faked. A story answering one of the three works weaker than a story holding all three together.

That also explains a common failure pattern in market entry. The cohort gets built by the local agency, the frame gets imported from headquarters, and the continuity question is never assigned to anyone at all. Each layer has an owner except the one that decides whether the buyer commits.

A test for the story you already have

If you are building a communication, a product or a personal statement, a concrete check follows. Does your story close at least one of the three requests, ideally all three at once.

Does it give a person a clear cohort they can place themselves into. Does it take part of the weight of independently holding their uniqueness off them, offering a ready and reliable frame. Does it confirm that the step you propose is a continuation of their personal history rather than a break with it.

For the Russian market each question has a sharper version. Is the cohort assembled from local material, or translated. Is the frame stated firmly enough to lean on, or hedged into uselessness. And is there anything in your story confirming continuity for someone who has already watched brands disappear. Answering these honestly usually requires talking to buyers rather than guessing, which is what customer research is for.

A story serving only an entertainment function, touching none of these three requests, stays a pleasant text. No force, no resonance, none of the effect storytelling exists for.

The collision people are actually looking for

The person gliding unnoticed through the shopping centre is not necessarily content with being invisible. Sometimes they move that way because they are not ready to carry the weight of their own separateness right now. Somewhere underneath, they are still looking for a moment of meaningful collision: a story, a character, a brand in which they can stop being invisible for a while and feel like someone specific again, without spending everything they have to hold that feeling up alone.

A brand arriving in Russia is offering itself as that collision. The question it has to answer first is whether the customer can afford to be seen by it.

Frequently asked questions

Sources

• Russian version of this article on belokrylovo.ru: История нужна не для развлечения, а чтобы не бояться