MARIAM ALI BAIG: What is your specific role at Ipsos?

CRISTINA CRACIUN: I am part of the global team. Motivational research is the craft of digging deeper into people’s tensions and dreams and identifying what their deepest fears and needs are. Understanding deeper human needs is an important part of the insights industry.

MAB: What is your background?

CC: I am a sociologist and an anthropologist.

MAB: How do you go about understanding these needs in practical terms?

CC: By observing or interviewing people. At our Ethnography Centre of Excellence (ECE), our team of anthropologists, ethnographers, sociologists, filmmakers and market researchers spend hours and even days with the same person. It takes time to lower people’s guards and really understand what is going on in their family dynamics or their relationships.

MAB: Are people generally open to this in-depth research?

CC: I first came to Pakistan before the pandemic for an ethnography project. I went to people’s homes and spent hours with them and met their families and looked in their cupboards and in their closets. You would be surprised by how willing people are to share their lives when someone is curious enough to ask and listen.

MAB: How difficult is it to find people that agree to do this?

Abdul Sattar Babar: Pakistan is among the few lucky markets left where people are very welcoming when it comes to being interviewed compared to other markets. On average, we do about 100,000 interviews almost every quarter. We carry out these interviews on a random basis across Pakistan, and Pakistan is not Karachi, Lahore, and Islamabad. These three metros constitute about 15% of Pakistan; the rest of the 85% live elsewhere and we receive feedback from representative samples across almost 500 cities and 45,000 villages. We train our interviewers on how to approach people. Their starting point is knocking on someone’s door and introducing themselves as representatives from Ipsos and explaining that we are here to gather their opinions on a certain subject; 95% of the time our interviewers are invited in and offered tea. Once people are satisfied that the person comes from a genuine research agency, they feel privileged that someone has made the effort to come and listen to their views; people are so frustrated, they want to express their feelings and opinions.

CC: We approach people based on topics that are relevant to them, and this makes them more willing to spend time with us and open up about their hopes and aspirations.

MAB: What are the topics you engage in with them?

CC: Everything from family dynamics to parenting and social policy to what people consume and what they want in terms of education. The first time I came to Pakistan, I was doing a study on what people drink. You could argue we don’t need to go into people’s homes because there is plenty of data available on what people drink and which brands. However, you don’t only want to know what they drink; you want to understand how the dynamics work. What do they drink on different occasions? Who are the people with them on these occasions and how do they feel during these occasions? Or, for example, if a company wants to launch a tea that is organic and sustainable, they will want to know if people actually care about being organic and sustainable or do they just talk about it, but when it comes to what they buy, this is not really a consideration. It is about understanding how people live and if their values are a real value or just a declarative value.

MAB: What insights have you found that are particular to Pakistan?

CC: The last time I was in Pakistan, I had many valuable conversations about women wanting to stay in the workplace. It was not only about having access to jobs; it was about a momentum among women who wanted to stay in the workplace even after they married and had children and the pressure that came from their families to give up their jobs. There was this desire, this impulse, that I did not see before the Covid-19 pandemic. I don’t know if this happened because of the pandemic or if the momentum was generational, or maybe it was there before and my mind did not observe it. Nevertheless, when I came back to Pakistan, I observed a lot of unprompted discourse around this issue.

MAB: In a household, who does one typically interview?

CC: It depends on the objective. If, for example, we are hired by a home cleaning product company, then we want to see the homemaker, and depending on the country and the culture, the homemaker is a different person – it cannot be automatically assumed it is the woman. In Mexico, for example, in the middle and higher socio-economic segments, you need to talk to the person who does the cleaning, because most households in that segment have someone who cleans the house and it is they who decide what is bought and used.

MAB: In Pakistan during the pandemic, a lot of companies brought out new ranges of household cleaning agents, yet the trend did not last.

CC: You are right; it was not sustained. What is more interesting is that the pandemic generated new habits we didn’t have before. In Pakistan, before the pandemic, you only talked to the mother in the household; what happened during the pandemic is that everyone in the family became very concerned about hygiene and disinfecting everything. Some teenage girls were putting disinfectant in their face toner to disinfect their skin. They saw this on social media. Imagine the impact on the skin! But what it meant was that beyond the product they chose, people had a need – a deep human need – the need for security and comfort.

This is what detergents did in that moment. It was not about what the product did; it was about feeling more in control. This is very important. To go beyond what people do or buy and understand what their deep fear or need is. This is what happened during the pandemic to every one of us. We expressed it in different ways and found different solutions. But we all had the same fear and the same need for comfort and control. This is the power of cultural research and insight.

MAB: What is the purpose of your visit to Pakistan now?

CC: I am here as part of Ipsos’ relaunch of our qualitative practice. Why do we need to relaunch our qualitative practice? Because qualitative research is a big part of the global insights industry and there has been something going on in the past 18 months, which is the generative AI revolution. AI is not a new thing, but since the beginning of 2023, generative AI is at our fingertips and has transformed the way we look at the insights industry. Generative AI is fabulous; something that would take weeks of collating and analysing can now be done in seconds. But there are also risks that come with this. The big topic last year was about the risk around privacy and protecting the confidentiality of the data. This year the big risk is trust. Do I trust the information I am getting? It is very important for market research practitioners like myself to keep the human in the equation. I could now easily say I don’t have the time and money to go to Pakistan; I will just ask AI what people in Pakistan think about climate change, for example, and then all the information and the data points about Pakistan and climate change will be at my fingertips. But I have to go deeper. I need to know the extent to which this is true and this can only come from real people. I need to understand what motivates them to care about climate change. Is it because they are thinking about the next generation? Because they are concerned about the destruction of ecosystems? Because they are diehard activists and support all the causes they find? There may be very different motivations, and to understand them we need the human element and the craft of knowing how to ask the right questions. I am here in Pakistan to build this bridge. Yes, let’s use generative AI. It’s fabulous; it gives me information in such an agile way. It helps me scale ideas and prove my talking points in such creative ways. But at the same time, let’s bridge AI with the best of human intelligence, with the power of being there in person and the power of empathy.

Abdul Sattar Babar is CEO, Ipsos in Pakistan.
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