While the 2012 ESOMAR Congress in Atlanta last month was stimulating and energizing – lots of discussion of where marketing research is now and where it needs to go – it was also unexpectedly moving.

Among the conference tracks on the future of research and related topics were sessions celebrating bravery in marketing research. While many presenters over the three days I was there spoke in life-or-death terms about the future of research – if we don’t evolve, we will die, etc. – two compelling presentations in the bravery track addressed real life-or-death matters and quickly put all of the other portentous talk into perspective.

Catalina Mejía of Bogota, Colombia, research firm YanHaas and Rafiq Ullah Kakar of Opinion Research Center of Afghanistan (ORCA) presented sobering portraits of conducting research in their respective countries. In both cases, interviewers faced harassment, intimidation, kidnapping and, in Afghanistan, death at the hands of Taliban soldiers.

Both spoke with admirable calm about the struggles of their respective teams. In Mejía’s case, during 2010-2011, her firm was asked by the Colombian military to conduct 7,000 interviews in 68 small towns across Colombia to obtain citizens’ impressions of the current state of things and how they view the role and presence of the military. The project was difficult from the very start: the first interviewing site was the town where the guerilla group Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia – People’s Army (better known by its Spanish acronym FARC) was formed in 1964.

Along with the constant specter, real and threatened, of kidnapping and other personal harm, interviewers’ movements were constantly shadowed. They were interrogated by FARC members. They faced landslides, washed-out roads, unmarked or poorly-marked houses and respondent hesitancy.

Kakar’s teams faced their own set of problems in Afghanistan: corruption; ethnic, linguistic and gender differences; extensive illiteracy; suspicion of and outright hostility toward research; severe cultural restrictions on access to households; threats from the Taliban (including ominously-named “night letters,” which urged the interviewers to stop doing research – in other words, stop spying for the international forces). Tribal elders had to be negotiated with in many towns in order to gain the correct password to enter the city.

Kakar spoke with pride of the creativity of the field workers as they strove to complete the interviews and keep themselves out of harm’s way. Researchers had to slay a sheep before a tribal elder as a show of apology in order to free an interviewer who was being held. Another interviewer, seeing Taliban members approaching, wrapped up her questionnaires in a cloth and began kissing it to make the Taliban think she was carrying a holy book.

Alas, their efforts were not always successful: In 2010 a young interviewer named Hosiy Sahibzada was killed in Kandahar City.

Session host Vinay Ahuja of Procter & Gamble, UAE, struck the perfect tone in his introductions and during the post-presentation Q&A, reflecting the audience members’ awe and appreciation for what Mejía and Kakar were relaying. Indeed, before the panel discussion following both presentations, he called for 15 seconds of silence to honor the memory of Sahibzada and another ORCA researcher who had been killed.

Without hesitation

When Ahuja asked during the panel discussion if it was all worth it, both Mejía and Kakar answered yes without hesitation. “The people of Afghanistan need to have a voice,” Kakar said. “And we are helping give them one.”

His comment echoed one of the oft-cited cultural benefits of research: that it “gives consumers a voice” and improves their lives by helping companies create more useful products and services. Research surely delivers there. But after listening to Mejía and Kakar, I don’t think I’ll ever think of that phrase in quite the same way.