No one else shares your "I don't care"

Two people from the same amateur group get the same correction from their coach. Same day, same tone, same words. One of them forgets it within an hour. The other replays the sentence for a week.

The usual explanation is temperament: one is thick-skinned, the other is sensitive. That explanation is wrong, and it is wrong in a way that costs money once you start writing messages for an audience. The difference lies in where each of them keeps their zero, the state from which any reaction begins.

This article is about that zero, and about why it matters more than usual for a company that sells into Russia from somewhere else.

A ruler with no common starting point

It is convenient to think about reactions as a ruler. At one end there is zero, complete indifference. Further along, the signal grows until it is strong enough to provoke a response. A small remark sits near zero, a serious insult sits far along the scale, and everyone is measured on the same ruler.

That single ruler does not exist. The zero point, the state of “I don’t care, I’m not reacting”, is set by the borders of a particular person’s identity rather than by the strength of the signal. It depends on what that person already considers part of themselves and what they do not.

The consequence follows directly. The same situation starts at different points of the scale for different people. Nobody is reacting more strongly or more weakly “in general”. The zone where “I do care” begins simply runs along a different border for each of them.

Why this is not about sensitivity

Go back to the coach. The correction was about technique. For the first person, the sessions are a way to spend an evening. Their identity is barely involved, the zero of their scale sits close to the remark itself, and the reaction fades quickly.

For the second person, the same sessions have long since become an extension of who they are. Their identity overlaps with the activity heavily, so the same sentence does not start from zero. It starts already well along the scale.

The mistake is to call the second person “too sensitive” and the first “indifferent to results”. Both react in exact proportion to the distance between the remark and the borders of their identity. Those borders just run in different places.

How to work with it

This changes the question you ask when you deal with anyone’s reaction. Instead of “why did he react so sharply”, the productive question is “where does his identity run, if this particular topic does not start from zero for him”.

Instead of looking for a universal measure of how serious an event is, it pays to map identity. Sometimes an individual’s, sometimes a group’s: what this person or this team already counts as their own, and what they do not yet.

The same applies far beyond criticism. It covers any signal, any message, any attempt to influence someone. A communicator, a marketer, a negotiator and a therapist all face the same task here. None of them needs universally correct words. Each of them needs to find where this person or this audience keeps its individual zero.

A message that worked where nobody expected

Take a mailing addressed to two groups of recipients at once. The wording is identical: a proposal to change a familiar way of working.

One group takes it calmly. The proposal lands in an area where they never identified strongly with the old way, so the zero of their scale is close to neutral.

The other group reacts sharply, up to outright rejection. For them the old way has long been part of their professional identity. The proposal does not start from a neutral point. It hits a nerve straight away.

If you read the second group’s reaction as “resistance to change”, you will choose the wrong fix: more pressure, the same message repeated louder. If you see that the problem is a different zero point, the fix changes. First you show that the proposal does not cancel their identity and keeps it in a new form. Only then do you talk about changing the way they work.

Where this bites in Russia

Everything above is general psychology. It becomes a practical market-entry problem the moment a company carries a message from one country to another.

A foreign company usually arrives with messaging that has been tested at home. The wording performed, the objections are known, the tone is settled. The natural move is to translate it and launch. What gets translated is the wording. What does not travel is the map of identity it was calibrated against. The home audience’s zero points were the hidden input to that tested message, and the Russian audience’s zero points are different in places nobody has checked.

So the same sentence can land neutrally at home and touch a nerve in Russia, or the other way round. A proposal to replace a familiar tool, a claim that your way of doing something is the modern one, a comparison with how things are done “in the West”: each of these sits at a different distance from what a Russian buyer treats as their own. Which ones are close and which are far is a question for research, and I would not guess it from a desk in another country. That includes my desk before the interviews.

There is also a structural difference in the advertising systems that makes the problem harder to see.

Why averaging hides it, in Yandex and in Google

Both Google and Yandex have moved toward ads assembled by the system. In Google that is a responsive search ad, in Yandex Direct a combinatorial ad inside a unified campaign: you supply several headlines and texts, and the system finds the combinations that perform best.

“Best” means best on average across everyone who saw the ad. Now apply the mailing example. If one segment reads your headline calmly and another reads it as an attack on something they value, the average shows a mediocre headline. The optimisation then picks a compromise that neither segment responds to particularly well, and the report gives you no hint that two opposite reactions were folded into one number.

This is the same in both systems. What differs in Russia is how much is at stake in the folding. At home, the segments were probably known before launch, and the account structure already reflected them. In a new market, the segments are exactly what you have not yet learned. Handing the machine a single pool of messages for an unknown audience means letting it average away the information you most need.

The practical rule: split the audience into groups by what you suspect touches their identity, give each group its own message, and only then let automated optimisation work inside each group. If the groups behave alike, merge them later. That costs a little. Discovering that one segment was quietly repelled for three months costs more.

What local practice requires

Mapping zero points in Russia needs Russian-language material. A survey translated from English inherits the categories of the original, so it measures the home market’s borders in a different language. Three sources work better:

1. Interviews in Russian, run by a native speaker. The point is the words people use about the activity your product touches, and where in the conversation their tone changes. That shift is the border you are looking for.
2. Reviews customers already wrote. Reviews of your category on Yandex Maps and on the marketplaces show what buyers defend, what they take for granted, and what makes them angry. Anger usually marks a border.
3. Search phrasing. The way people formulate queries in Yandex Wordstat shows which words they use for the problem. A query phrased around a habit or a role tells you more about identity than one phrased around a product.

This is the work behind customer research for the Russian market, and it comes before the copy, not after the first disappointing month.

What to do if you sell into Russia from abroad

The applied conclusion is simple and harsh at the same time: never judge the strength of a reaction by the objective size of the event. Judge it by the distance between the event and the borders of a specific person’s identity. That distance cannot be calculated in advance. You can only find it out by looking at a specific person or a specific group.

For a company entering the market, that turns into a short sequence:

1. List what your message asks people to change. A tool, a habit, a supplier, a way of thinking about the category. Each item is a candidate for touching identity.
2. Check each item against Russian material. Interviews, reviews, queries. Mark which ones sit close to what your buyers consider their own.
3. For the close ones, lead with continuity. Show what stays the same before you talk about what changes.
4. Separate segments in the ad account. Give each its own message and read the results per segment, not on average.
5. Treat pushback as data. A sharp reaction tells you where a border runs. More pressure only confirms to the audience that the border was under attack.

If you are still deciding how to enter the market at all, this belongs in the market entry plan rather than in a later fix.

All of this takes more patience than a universal formula of “this event deserves that reaction”. Reality demands it anyway. Your “I don’t care” has no twin in anyone else. Until that is accounted for, every message will land on someone else’s starting point instead of the one your reader actually has.

Frequently asked questions

Sources

• Russian version of this article on belokrylovo.ru: Вашего «мне всё равно» ни у кого больше нет