Where before what: locating a marketing problem

A head of international sales says on a first call: “Something is off with Russia, but I can’t tell you what exactly.” They are not being vague on purpose. They are describing, quite honestly, a state in which the first condition of any diagnosis has not appeared yet. There is no place where that “something” could be located.

Before you work out what is happening, you have to work out where it is happening. This sounds like a secondary question. It is the first one there is, and the easiest to skip.

Condition zero

Start from the very beginning. For anything to be located, named and found, there has to be a space in which it can exist. I do not mean space in metres or on a map. I mean an area in which this “something” can have an address at all.

The condition is so basic that people jump over it. They go straight to “what happened” and “what do we do”. The area in which the event could exist as a separate thing stays undefined. Then every later question hangs in the air. There is an answer somewhere, but nowhere to put it.

In the systems framework I use for analysis, everything starts with space. Emotion, identity and process all come later, and none of them can appear without it. A boundary needs an area to enclose. A contrast needs two places to compare. A channel needs two points to run between. The other building blocks are described in four bricks of market analysis; this article stays with the first one.

What it looks like in a business

The original version of this text was written about people. Someone says “I feel bad at work”. The sentence sounds concrete, but the space in it is not set. Bad where? With colleagues, with the tasks, with status, with money, with the sense of what they are doing? Until that is settled, “bad” is a cloud rather than a point. You cannot work with it, because it has nowhere to be.

A company says exactly the same kind of sentence about a market. “Russia is not converting.” “Our Yandex campaigns don’t work.” “Leads from Russia are poor.” Each of these sounds like a finding and contains no address. Not converting where? In search or in the advertising network? In Moscow or in the regions? On mobile or desktop? Between the click and the form, or between the form and the first call?

The first move in any such situation is to mark out the space, before you discuss content at all. “Which part of ‘not converting’ are we talking about: traffic, the site, or sales?” This is not a soft way of asking the question or a consulting trick. It literally draws the grid that everything else will later be placed on: boundaries, comparisons, the direction of change.

The same applies inside a team. “The atmosphere around the Russia project has gone bad” gives you nothing until a space appears. Bad between whom? Around which decision? Since when? The point is not to phrase things nicely. Without a space you cannot point a finger at anything.

Why this step is harder in Russia

The principle is universal. What is specific to Russia is how many more places a problem can hide in, and how few of them a foreign team expects.

A company coming from a Google-dominated market brings a mental map of the funnel with it. Search means Google, analytics means Google Analytics, a lead means a form or an email, and the buyer comes to your site. In Russia almost every element of that map has a different address.

Search runs largely through Yandex, with its own auction, its own ranking logic and its own regional settings. Google Ads stopped serving ads in Russia in 2022, so any paid search plan built on the home account has to be rebuilt rather than copied. In Yandex Direct, regions are set on each ad group, which means the same campaign can behave like several different campaigns at once. A “conversion problem” can live in one region and be invisible in the total.

The buying conversation moves too. A large part of the first contact happens in messengers, Telegram and WhatsApp, not in a form or an email thread. If your tracking counts only forms and calls, a whole stretch of the funnel has no address in your reports. The problem then gets assigned to whatever part you can see, usually the ads.

In many categories the buyer never reaches your site at all. Marketplaces such as Ozon and Wildberries sit between you and the customer, and a sale can be won or lost on a product card you barely look at. A company that keeps searching for its problem on its own landing page is searching in the wrong space.

None of this makes Russia mysterious. It means that the home map has to be redrawn before it can be used, and that “where” takes longer to answer here than a foreign team expects.

Why you cannot jump over it

The temptation is strong: go straight to the solution. “Tell me what’s wrong and I’ll tell you what to do.” If the space is not defined, any solution is a solution for an object that does not exist. You fix something that cannot be found, and then wonder why nothing changed.

This goes well beyond conversations about feelings. An organisation that sets out to “increase engagement” without defining where, among whom, around which task, invests in a fog. Six months later the numbers have not moved, and nobody can explain why. There was no target, only an area without edges.

A foreign company in Russia does the same thing at a larger scale. “Improve performance in Russia” becomes a new agency, a new budget, a redesigned landing page, all at once. When results stay flat, there is no way to learn anything, because nobody said in advance where the problem was supposed to be. The next round repeats the pattern with a different contractor.

Space is the answer to “where”. It is not the answer to “what” or “why”. That is exactly why everything starts with it: “what” and “why” only make sense once there is a “where”.

What local practice demands

A few habits make the “where” question answerable quickly on Russian accounts.

Split every report by address before you read it. Search and the advertising network apart. Regions apart, at least Moscow, Saint Petersburg and the rest. Devices apart. A total for Russia as a whole is a cloud by construction.

Give every contact a place in the funnel. Calls, forms, messenger conversations and marketplace orders need to land in tracking as separate events. Yandex Metrica can record goals for each of them; what matters is that someone decides they are separate.

Ask the person on the ground for an address, not an opinion. “Leads are bad” is an opinion. “Leads from the advertising network in the regions don’t answer the phone” is an address. If your local contractor cannot give you the second kind of sentence, that is a finding in itself, and an important one.

Keep Yandex Ads and the page behind them in one picture. In Russia the site is often the last thing built and a translation of the original. A problem that looks like an advertising problem frequently sits on the page, and you only see that if both are inside the same space.

What to do with this

The practical conclusion is simple, even if it runs against instinct. Before you get into the content of the problem, the campaign, the conflict or the drop in sales, ask yourself or your team one question: what exactly is this about? Not “what happened”, but in which space did it happen at all.

For a company selling into Russia from abroad, a short route:

1. Take the complaint as it is phrased. “Russia isn’t working” is a fine starting point, as long as nobody mistakes it for a diagnosis.
2. List the possible addresses. Channel, region, segment, device, step of the funnel, time period. In Russia, add messengers and marketplaces to the list.
3. Pick the one where the problem is visible. A rough answer is enough. You need something you could point at in a report.
4. Only then ask what and why. Now the answer has a place to go.

This is slower than diving straight into the content. That slowness saves time later: you stop spending effort on a problem that has no address yet. If you would rather have someone outside the company draw that map, customer research is usually where it starts.

Later in the framework a boundary appears that encloses the space, and a contrast that gives it direction. All of that is possible only because somewhere, even roughly, the question “where” has already been answered. Until it has, everything else is fine words with nothing under them.

Before asking what is wrong, ask where it is. The answer to the second question sometimes removes the need for the first.

Frequently asked questions

Sources

• Russian version of this article on belokrylovo.ru: Пока нет пространства, ничего не может произойти