Why the same news wounds one person and leaves another untouched

Two people hear the same news on the same day: the project is closed. One shrugs and goes for coffee. The other cannot sleep for a week. The news is identical. What differs is the distance between what each of them means by “me” and what has just happened.

That distance has a name in the systems framework I work with: contrast. No process starts without it. A reaction, an emotion, a purchase, a refusal to buy: each of them is launched by a contrast, and each of them is as strong as the contrast allows.

This explains why a campaign that worked at home goes flat in another market. Below is the mechanism, then its Russian side, where foreign companies most often misjudge it.

A difference in potential, not the force of a stimulus

It feels natural to look for the cause of a reaction in the event itself: how objectively serious was it? The systems view suggests looking elsewhere.

There is the self, the zone of a person’s identity. There is the event or signal, which in the broad sense is “not-self”: whatever happens outside or inside a person that does not match their current position. Contrast is the difference in potential between the two. The intensity of the process that follows is set by the size of that difference, not by the strength of the stimulus. One condition applies: the channel between the self and the stimulus has to stay open.

Back to the two people and the one piece of news. For the first, the project was an edge of identity, something he had invested status and future in. The contrast between “me” and “the project is gone” is enormous. For the second, the project was one task among many, and the overlap with his identity was thin. The contrast is small, even though formally the event is the same.

The mechanism: the larger the difference, the stronger the process

The rule here is simple and almost physical. The larger the contrast with an open channel, the more intense the process. I do not use this as a decorative metaphor. It is the scaling axiom on which the rest of the model of emotions is built. The size of the contrast predicts the strength of the response as reliably as the potential difference in a circuit predicts the current, as long as the circuit is not broken.

This is why the “objective weight” of an event predicts a person’s reaction so badly. A much better predictor is how deeply the event touches the zone the person considers to be themselves. A small remark from a colleague can cause a storm if it lands exactly on the edge of identity. A serious setback can pass almost unnoticed if it happens where there is little identity to hit.

The channel condition matters as much as the size of the gap. If a person does not hear the message, does not read it, or has already filed the sender as irrelevant, the contrast can be as large as you like and nothing will happen. A broken circuit carries no current. For a brand this means two separate jobs: keep the channel open, and decide how large a contrast to send down it.

An example: criticism in a meeting

Take a scene most people know. In a meeting, someone gently criticises an idea. For one person in the room this is an ordinary working moment, feedback on a task and nothing more. The contrast is minimal, because the idea is not the same thing as “me”. For another person the very same sentence feels like a blow. The idea was an extension of his competence and his standing. The contrast is huge, and the reaction matches it, up to defensive aggression or a silent withdrawal.

The decisive factor is not the wording of the critic. It is how far the zone “the idea” overlaps with the zone “me” in the person who heard it. This is the same mechanism that governs the intensity of any emotion: contrast plus an open channel.

What this changes in communication

The practical conclusion is easy to miss. To predict how strongly a person will react to a message, assessing the content of the message is not enough. You have to estimate how deeply that content overlaps with the zone of their identity.

It works in both directions. If you want a message to land, increase the contrast: show how directly it concerns what the person considers to be themselves. Good advertising and a good call to action work this way. They do not describe facts; they aim at the gap between the offer and the identity of the audience. If, on the other hand, you need to soften the reaction to unwelcome news, lower the contrast. Show that only a narrow part of the identity is touched, not the whole of it. “The project is closed” sounds different from “your work was for nothing”. The first lands on the zone of the task. The second lands on the whole identity.

Why the identity map does not travel

Here is where the Russian angle comes in. The mechanism of contrast is universal. The map of identity zones is not. What a buyer treats as part of themselves depends on the market, the category, the segment and the moment, and a foreign company almost always arrives with a map drawn somewhere else.

A typical case: a Western brand enters Russia with copy that was tested at home. The copy aims at a zone that matters to its home audience, say personal achievement or individual choice. In Russia the same lines may land in a zone where the reader has invested less of themselves, and the message reads as pleasant noise. Or the opposite happens: a phrase that was neutral at home touches something a Russian reader treats as personal, such as their professional competence, the way they run their household or their sense of being taken seriously as a market, and the response is defensive. In both cases the translation can be perfect. The miscalculation is about distance, not about language.

There is also a contextual layer that is specific to the last few years. After 2022 many Western brands left the Russian market, and buyers who stayed formed their own views about foreign companies. I will not pretend to know what each segment feels about that, and nobody should assume it from outside. What follows from the model is narrower: for some audiences the very fact that a brand is foreign may already sit close to the identity zone, which raises the stakes of every message the brand sends. That is a hypothesis to test in research, not a premise to build a campaign on.

Where Yandex differs from Google here

Search advertising looks like the most rational channel, where contrast should matter least: the person typed a query, you answer it. In practice the mechanism is still at work, and the Russian environment shapes it in two ways.

First, the ad format is short. In Yandex Direct the headline and the text leave room for very little, and with combinatorial ads the system assembles the final version from your variants. You do not control which combination a given person sees. If one of your headlines aims at a sensitive zone and another at a neutral one, the system will mix them, and the same campaign will hit different people at very different distances. With Google Ads responsive search ads the logic of assembly is similar, but foreign teams usually write Yandex variants by translating their Google set, which carries the home market’s identity map straight into the Russian auction.

Second, the landing page either confirms the contrast or breaks it. A person clicks because the ad touched something. If the page speaks to a different zone, the channel drops and the person leaves. A Russian site translated from an English original is especially exposed to this gap.

Contrast is a variable you can manage

Contrast is not a constant. It is a variable you can work with. A conversation that first lowers the contrast (“this is not about you, it is about the circumstances”) and then introduces new information gradually produces a completely different dynamic from one that hits the contrast at full strength in the first sentence.

For a company this applies at every step of the buyer’s path. A price increase, a refused request, a changed delivery term: each is news, and each lands at some distance from the reader’s identity. You can choose that distance.

What to do if you sell into Russia from abroad

A short route, based on the mechanism above rather than on any market statistics:

1. Do not assume your identity map transfers. List the zones your home messaging aims at. Treat each one as a hypothesis for the Russian market, to be checked rather than translated.
2. Find out what your category touches here. Interviews and analysis of real buyer language show which parts of identity your product sits close to. This is the core of customer research, and it is cheaper than learning the same thing from a failed launch.
3. Write ad variants for a known distance. In combinatorial Yandex ads, every variant can end up next to every other. Make sure none of them lands where you did not intend.
4. Check that the page continues the contrast the ad started. If the ad touched competence and the page talks about price, the channel breaks.
5. Plan unwelcome news. Price changes, refusals and policy updates deserve the same care as acquisition copy. Lower the contrast first, then give the facts.
6. Keep the brand consistent. A clear brand strategy defines which zones you speak to on purpose, so that different teams and contractors do not each pick their own.

The strength of a reaction is not a property of the news. It is a property of the distance between the news and who the person thinks they are. Change that distance and you change the force of the process long before you change the facts. For more on how a boundary is created by a difference, see a boundary is a difference, not a wall.

Frequently asked questions

Sources

• Russian version of this article on belokrylovo.ru: Почему одна новость ранит одного и не задевает другого