Why customer words about emotions can't be trusted

A respondent in a focus group says: “I choose on price and quality, I compare options, I read reviews.” A week later the same person picks the familiar brand off the shelf without looking at the tag. What people say about themselves and what they do almost never match. If you build marketing on what customers say, you build it on sand.

This is not about customers lying. They are honest. Between what actually happens inside a person and what they are able to say about it, there are several filters. Each filter drops something or adds something. By the time an experience has become the phrase “it worked for me” or “a bit pricey”, only a shadow of the original picture remains.

For a company selling into Russia from another country, there is an extra layer. Every one of those filters gets passed through a translator, an agency or a local manager before it reaches the person making the decision. The shadow gets a second shadow. So it is worth knowing exactly where the truth leaks out, and what to do with research when you are the one paying for it.

A person does not see their own emotion in full

Picture an iceberg. The visible part above water is around a tenth of the whole. The same goes for an emotion: only a small tip of what is going on in the body and the head reaches awareness.

While you read this line, your breathing shifts, your shoulders tighten a little, and your brain tags the words as “interesting” or “dull” in a fraction of a second. You notice none of it. What reaches consciousness is the finished verdict: “decent article” or “nonsense”. The work that produced the verdict stays hidden.

So when a person explains their reaction, they describe the surface. An office example. An employee says: “I’m irritated because my colleague was late to the meeting.” Sounds logical. Dig a bit. All week the person has been overloaded: deadlines, poor sleep, things at home. Nerves stretched to the limit. On a calm day the lateness would not even register. Here it landed on a string already pulled tight and snapped it.

The colleague’s lateness is the trigger, not the cause. The cause is a week of accumulated fatigue that lets any small thing through the defences. The person sees only the trigger. The tight string is outside their field of view.

The marketing conclusion is simple. When a customer says “I left the site because I couldn’t find the price”, that may be true on the surface. The real reason: a minute earlier a pop-up banner pulled at them three times and patience ran out. The price was the last drop, not the root cause. They will honestly name the drop. About the rest, they simply do not know.

Translated sites for the Russian market produce this pattern constantly. A foreign company hears “the price was unclear” from a Russian respondent and rebuilds the pricing page. The actual irritant was a consent pop-up in English, a form that rejected a Russian phone format, or a chat widget covering the button on a phone. None of that comes up in an interview, because none of it reached the respondent’s awareness as a separate event.

Words are never enough

Even if a person could see their reaction in full, they could not retell it. Language is too poor for the job.

Try right now to describe in words the taste of your morning coffee. Not “good” and not “strong”, but properly: every shade, the aftertaste, the temperature, the way it fused with the feeling of the day starting. You will get a rough outline. The richness of the sensation crumbles as it turns into words.

Emotions are the same, only the losses are bigger. The word “anxiety” is one word. Behind it stands a whole orchestra: a tightening somewhere under the ribs, a faster pulse, narrowed attention, a nagging image of a bad future, a sense that control is about to slip. All of it packed into one short word. The orchestra plays and one note comes out.

This is the direct problem with questionnaires. When you write “rate your trust in the brand from 1 to 10”, what exactly is the person rating? A sense of reliability? Fondness for the advertising? The last purchase experience? Three different things and one cell. One respondent’s seven and another’s seven can mean entirely different things. You add the numbers, compute an average and enjoy the precision. There is no precision there. You averaged things that were never about the same subject.

Now add a language border. A questionnaire written in English, translated into Russian by an agency, answered in Russian, summarised back into English. Russian has its own vocabulary for trust, comfort and doubt, and the words do not map one to one. The respondent compresses a feeling into one Russian word, the translator picks the nearest English equivalent, and the report presents the result as a measured quantity. Two compressions instead of one. If you commission research in Russia, ask for the original Russian wording of open answers, not the translated gist. The gist is already an interpretation.

Memory of an emotion always rewrites it

There is one more filter, the most treacherous. The mind cannot stand gaps. If the real cause of a reaction is out of reach, and it usually is, the brain will not leave the space empty. It will invent an explanation. Not a deliberate lie: a construction. It picks the nearest plausible “because” and presents it as the truth.

“I’m angry at my colleague because he was late.” A neat, coherent, consistent story. Only the “because” here is not about the real cause. It is about the need for a convenient plot. The lateness is right there, in plain view, easy to blame. The accumulated fatigue is invisible and cannot be put into an explanation.

Now add time. A memory of an emotion is further from the truth than an account given on the spot. When a person remembers, they do not play back a recording. They rebuild it from what is left, and they fit it to today’s mood, to how things ended, to the conclusions they have drawn since. If the deal went well, the customer will recall that they “felt trust straight away”. If it fell through, the same moment becomes “something felt off from the start”. One event. Memory has rewritten it in both directions.

This is why the question “why did you buy from us six months ago” gives you the customer’s convenient current version, not the reason for the purchase. A pretty version. Useless for repeating the result.

What to do with focus groups and surveys, then

Does this mean interviews, surveys and focus groups go in the bin? No. You need to understand what they give and what they do not.

The three filters always work: a person sees only the tip, words are poorer than the experience, and memory builds a convenient plot. Pass any self-report through those three sieves and it becomes clear what customer words actually show. Not the real mechanics of their choice, but how they see themselves and which words they use to describe themselves.

That is valuable. Genuinely valuable, for two things.

First, language. The customer tells you which words they use to think about the problem. Those same words go back to them in headlines, offers and descriptions. Not “customer journey optimisation” but “so people stop abandoning the cart”. When a brand speaks the customer’s language, recognition fires instantly. For a foreign company this is the strongest argument for research in Russia: the words Russian buyers use for your category are not a translation of the words your home customers use, and a translated headline rarely hits them. How that language turns into a voice for the brand is covered in the work on brand strategy.

Second, segments. Different people tell different stories about themselves. One talks about saving, another about status, a third about safety. Even if these stories do not reflect the real causes, they divide the audience into groups very well. By group, you set different messages in advertising, including targeted campaigns where each segment gets its own creative.

What a focus group will not show is how a person will actually behave. That takes other instruments. Watch what the customer does rather than what they say: behavioural analytics on the site, heat maps and session recordings, where the cursor runs and where the eye gets stuck, A/B tests that catch an action rather than an opinion, observation of where a person slows down in checkout and at which step they leave.

Here the Russian market is kinder to a foreign company than it looks. Yandex Metrica, the counter you will be running anyway, includes session replay, click maps, scroll maps and form analytics at no extra cost, on the same tag. In the Google ecosystem most of that is a separate paid tool. If your Russian site has Metrica installed and nobody has opened the session recordings, the behavioural half of your research is sitting unread in an account you already own.

A live example: how a survey misled a coffee shop

A small coffee shop decided to find out what its guests wanted. They ran a survey. People wrote in unison: more choice, add plant milk, make the menu more varied, more rare beans. The owner believed the words and doubled the menu. Shelves filled up, baristas learned new recipes, purchasing grew.

Sales did not move. Worse, the queue got slower: people took longer to choose and got irritated. Then the owner stopped asking and started watching. It turned out nine out of ten guests ordered the same thing every day: a medium cappuccino. The rare beans gathered dust. The expanded menu did not please people, it frightened them: too many options, hard to decide, awkward to hold up the queue.

Run it through the filters. In the survey, people described their image of themselves, not their behaviour: “I am a person who values choice.” That sounds pleasant, so that is what went on the form. They had no words for the real reason (“I feel calmer taking the familiar thing and not thinking”), and nobody wants to admit it anyway. And in hindsight everyone remembered themselves as a connoisseur of variety, even though their hand reached for the same cup.

What would have worked instead of the survey: a month of sales records. They would have shown honestly that people needed speed and the stable taste of something familiar, not breadth of choice. The answer was in the till, not in the questionnaire.

The survey was not wasted, though. It produced something useful too: guests sincerely want to feel like people with taste, for whom choice matters. That need can be met another way, without inflating the menu. One seasonal item of the month, recommended personally by the barista, would give the same sense of choice and care without slowing the queue or frightening anyone. The customer’s words pointed to the real desire. Behaviour showed the form to deliver it in. Both sources were useful. Each answered its own question.

Where the most valuable insight hides

The right strategy is not a choice between words and actions. You need both sources at once. Words say how the customer sees themselves. Behaviour says how they actually live. And here is the main point: look at the gap between them, not at each source on its own.

The divergence between what a person says and what they do is where the truth hides. The customer declares: “I choose on price and quality, I am a rational buyer.” Look at the behaviour: picks the habitual brand without looking, overpays and does not compare. The gap is huge. In that gap sits the real mechanism of choice. Not calculation but habit, and the emotional memory of a hand that reaches for familiar packaging.

Take that gap and use it. If a person says “price matters to me” and buys the expensive option, price is not an argument for them. It is a way to justify the choice to themselves. Then the advertising should not push a discount. It should hand them a reason they can explain the purchase with: “you pay for what won’t let you down.” You work with the real motive but dress it in the words they are used to calming themselves with.

For a company entering Russia from outside, the gap is also the cheapest check on your agency. If the research deck contains only quotes and ratings, you are holding half the picture, and the convenient half. Ask for the behavioural layer in the same report: what people bought, where they clicked, at which step they left. Where the two layers disagree, that is the finding. A deck without disagreements usually means nobody looked.

There is a simple way to start. Take the latest customer survey report and lay it next to real behaviour statistics: what people actually buy, where they click, where they leave. Mark the places where the numbers argue with the words. Each of those disagreements is a clue your competitors cannot see, because they read only surveys. That gap is also a convenient starting point for customer research on the Russian market: it shows at once which of the two realities your advertising money is paying for.

Listen to what the customer says. Write it down. Then quietly watch what they do. The truth lives in the gap between the two.

Frequently asked questions

Sources

• Russian version of this article on belokrylovo.ru: Почему словам об эмоциях нельзя верить