The Ipsos 40th anniversary celebration will travel the globe this year, starting with Dubai in April and traveling to other global hubs like Shanghai, New York, Toronto, Istanbul, and ending in the founding city of Paris in October. Communicate has the opportunity to visit with Didier Truchot, one of Ipsos’ founders and global group president, during his visit to Dubai for the first of ten global celebrations of the milestone. Truchot explains why Dubai is the first stop: “I wanted to start with Dubai because it’s the newest business city in the world.”

What are the major points of development experienced by Ipsos in the past 40 years?

When I started the company 40 years ago with three other people, it was a very tiny French boutique research company. Currently, many of our clients are facing some interesting changes and of course our clients that are overcoming these changes efficiently and quickly will be the winners of the day.

One major change since the company’s roots are the people people are changing; in general, people  are more educated and more connected. They feel like they have more power in their choices, like where they want to put their money. Markets are becoming more competitive: we have seen the development of global companies to get new consumers in every market. Lastly, the development of digital channels has created a fragmentation: this has created some opportunities to engage with people differently, but has also introduced a lot of complexity and a lot of confusion.

Now more than ever, we need to work very closely with our clients, and to learn with them. It’s a totally new world, but our goal is to learn as quickly as possible, and to develop new solutions as quickly as possible but to be in a position to help our clients as much as we can.

What does the 40th anniversary represent?

It’s a milestone that we are using as an opportunity to regroup, to think about our story. We are always learning from what we have done in the past, including the mistakes and achievements. We can talk about who we are and where we want to go to the external marketplace. The culture is what makes Ipsos unique. We want to inspire our professionals to think within the company but also to think with their clients, and to remain open minded.

What type of evolution needs to happen going forward?

The first priority is speed, we need to deliver our services much more quickly to our clients, which is very easy to say but more complicated to actually do. Ipsos has been historically a survey-based company. It’s now time to embrace new ways to get information, like passive measurements like data. We need to have multiple techniques so we can choose the best type of service at the right time. We need to continue to foster our relationships with our clients as they need more advice and services. We need to work more closely with our clients than traditionally; we need to be more imbedded in our clients agencies to understand better what they need and how to provide that.

What excites you about the future?

We are at a time where the information about society, markets, and people is becoming so complicated but also so important, but we are exactly where we wanted to be at this point when we founded the company. We are becoming more and more of a long-term strategy partner with our clients. We think that we know how to get there with all our clients, to become a great source of information for the marketplace.