How Pakistan's socio-economic classes are actually measured

From a school teacher’s son to founding Pulse Consultant

The episode opens with Kashif Hafeez Siddiqui tracing a path that is, by his own description, defined by constraint and persistence. His father was a school teacher in the conventional mould — one who did not take private tuitions, who was, as Kashif puts it, “very sparing.” Growing up in the seventies, the family was in a struggling phase. When his father retired, Kashif was left to cover his own expenses while studying pre-medical at DJ Science College in Karachi — one of only three or four colleges in the city that carried real prestige at the time, alongside Adamjee and Saint Joseph’s for women.

To pay his way, he took a job as a medical representative. It was that role, travelling across Karachi and later through southern Punjab, that gave him an unusually granular feel for the city’s geography, its class structures, and its cultural textures. When computers arrived in his office, he did not know how to use one. He bought one for home, stayed back two hours after office hours to practise Word and PowerPoint, and then taught himself the research software. “It was the mehnat,” he says — the grind — that moved him forward.

After stints at research firms, including a forty-day stretch at Nielsen Pakistan, he decided that if he was going to work hard for someone, it should be for himself. On 16 December 2012, he registered Pulse Consultant. The first project was a stationary audit for Dollar Industries worth three and a half lakh rupees. Ten years later, Muzamil asks him where the company stands. “We are not the leading company in Pakistan,” Kashif says plainly. “We are one of the leading. We are a good company with a good image. Whatever we are doing, we are doing good work.”

Pakistan is not four provinces — it is 16 cultural belts

The most structurally important idea Kashif introduces is that dividing Pakistan by province is the wrong unit of analysis for anyone trying to understand consumer behaviour, media habits, or political sentiment. Pulse Consultant divides the country into 16 cultural belts, each with its own eating habits, media preferences, and social norms.

He walks through several examples. Karachi is its own belt — a cosmopolitan city where new cultural forms are constantly being created. Moving inland, Hyderabad to Nawabshah forms a distinct Sindhi belt. Kashif makes a point that Muzamil finds genuinely surprising: Sindhi is the only language that made the transition from Sanskrit script to Arabic script, and the cultural identity embedded in that history — visible even in the shape of the Sindhi topi — is a living tradition, not a relic. “Mainstream ke andar Sindh ko bada woh kiya gaya hai,” Kashif observes, noting that Sindhi culture has been consistently underrepresented in national discourse.

A 2008 nationwide survey he conducted revealed that Sindhi communities had high newspaper readership, strong language loyalty, and above-average rates of education and domestic travel — findings that cut against the stereotypes that national media tends to project. Moving to Balochistan, he notes that Quetta is a Pashtun representative city, not a Baloch one, and that the Pashtun communities along the Chaman belt have a distinct culture, dress, and social code that differs from Pashtuns elsewhere. The implication for anyone running a national survey or a national media campaign is significant: if your sampling does not account for these distinctions, your data is not national — it is urban-centric and culturally flattened.

It was this methodology, Kashif says, that allowed Pulse Consultant to be the first and only firm to predict a PTI victory in the 2018 general election, at a time when most analysts were calling it for PML-N.

The SEC grid: who actually belongs to which class

Muzamil raises a question that sits at the heart of the episode: how do you actually classify socio-economic classes in Pakistan, given that almost everyone self-identifies as middle class regardless of their circumstances?

Kashif explains that the Pakistan Advertisers Society — a regulatory body for the advertising industry — commissioned a major study to answer exactly this question. The result is a Socio-Economic Classification grid built on a combination of education and income variables. The grid runs from A1 at the top down to E2 at the bottom, with seven tiers in total. Collapsed into plain language: A is upper class, B and C are middle class, D is lower middle class, and E1 and E2 are the lower classes.

The numbers are striking. The upper class as a whole — SEC A — represents roughly 10% of the urban population. Within that, SEC A1, the true elite, is only 2.5%. “Woh ढाई percent hi hai society ka,” Kashif says. And that group, he adds, is essentially invisible to conventional surveys — too small, too dispersed, and too unlikely to participate in standard fieldwork to be reliably captured.

Muzamil adds his own data point from a 2019 review of Pakistan Bureau of Statistics figures: at that time, only 6% of Pakistanis held university degrees, and car ownership stood at 1.8% of the population. These numbers, he notes, were genuinely shocking when he first encountered them — a reminder of how distorted the picture becomes when media, marketing, and public discourse are all produced by and for a tiny educated urban minority.

The three-E trap and what brands get wrong

From the SEC framework, the conversation moves to what it means for marketing practice. Kashif introduces the concept of the “three-E trap”: everything is not for everyone, and it should not be available everywhere. The failure to internalise this principle, he argues, is one of the most common and costly mistakes brands make in Pakistan.

His example is direct: a ten-rupee English toothpaste and Sensodyne are not competing for the same consumer. Sensodyne is targeting SEC A and B. The ten-rupee paste is targeting D and E. If a brand tries to be present everywhere and speak to everyone, it ends up being meaningful to no one. The insight work that Pulse does — whether quantitative surveys measuring what, when, and where, or qualitative focus groups probing why and how — is ultimately in service of helping brands locate themselves accurately within this grid and then reach the right people through the right channels.

On the question of digital marketing’s rise, Kashif is measured. Digital is the best option when budgets are limited, he says. But artificial intelligence-driven targeting is both a blessing and a curse — it can reach the right person with precision, but it can also create filter bubbles and amplify the wrong signals. The fundamental discipline of defining your target market before choosing your medium has not changed; the tools have.

PSL brand audit and the business of measuring attention

One of Pulse Consultant’s signature products is what Kashif calls the PSL Brand Audit — a study conducted during the Pakistan Super League, which he describes as the single largest brand competition in the country. During PSL, 150 to 200 brands spend billions of rupees competing for consumer attention across grounds, broadcasts, and digital platforms. The audit measures brand recall and consumer awareness across that competitive field, telling each brand where it actually stood in the noise.

It is a concrete illustration of the kind of work the firm does: not just tracking sales or reach, but measuring the cognitive footprint a brand leaves in a consumer’s memory after a sustained period of exposure. In a market where brands are spending at scale but often without rigorous feedback loops, this kind of recall measurement fills a genuine gap.

Media’s low conceptualisation and what Pakistan is missing

Later in the discussion, Muzamil raises the state of Pakistani media — its polarisation, its sensationalism, and its failure to perform the explanatory function that journalism is supposed to serve. Kashif does not soften his assessment. “Media toh hamare koi bahut hi sensible logon ke hathon mein nahi hai, boss,” he says. The polarisation visible across channels is not just a product of political pressure; it reflects what he calls “media ki low mentality aur low conceptualisation.”

He contrasts this with what he observed in American media coverage of inflation in 2022. Six months before inflation became a lived reality for American consumers, outlets were already publishing detailed explanations of supply-side bottlenecks, shipping container shortages, and what was coming. Pakistani media, by contrast, tends to reach for the dramatic frame first — who attacked whom, who scored a point — rather than building the kind of contextual understanding that would actually serve its audience.

On political polling specifically, Kashif notes that in India and the United States, media organisations sponsor exit polls and opinion surveys as a matter of course. In Pakistan, the ecosystem for that kind of independent, media-funded research barely exists. Geo is one of the few channels that commissions surveys, and Kashif is careful to note that in his experience working with them, they have never once interfered with questionnaire design or attempted to change a single data point. “They are totally impartial,” he says. But the broader infrastructure — multiple competing, credible, publicly available polls — is absent.

A generation built on social media, and what comes after

By the end of the conversation, Kashif turns to a longer-term concern. Pakistan in 2022 is roughly 28 years away from its centenary as a nation. The generation that will be alive for that moment is being shaped right now — and what it is being shaped by, he argues, is a combination of short-term political mobilisation and social media environments that reward debate over skill-building.

“Hum ne ek nayi nasl khadi kar di hai Facebook aur social media ke upar jis mein jinke paas duniya ka sab kaam pairi dafa ho raha hai, muqabalna bhi kar sakte hain.” Young people can argue about anything. But the institutional investment in turning that energy into productive capability — skilled trades, technical education, a state with a coherent vision — is not there. The dislocation this creates, he warns, will not show its full consequences immediately. “Iska impact abhi nahi aayega. Iska impact bahut baad mein aayega.”

His closing thought is a call to look at societies that have managed to modernise without abandoning their traditions — Japan, Germany, the Arab states — as evidence that the two are not in conflict. Pakistan’s challenge is not to choose between modernity and culture, but to find the discipline to hold both.