My say brings easy-hand surveying

Every marketer knows that tracking the performance of brands’ campaigns is vital. Surveys represent one of the most efficient and inexpensive research methods available to collect representative, high quality data from large numbers of research participants. With that in mind, a new survey app called ‘mysay’ has been launched. Mysay app lets you track and compile user responses and see results in real-time, so that within minutes your product and marketing teams can view findings from the campaign, and identify issues as they emerge rather than days later. In a talk with Arabad, Paul Jazzar, Chief Technical Officer at mysay explains that it has never been easier, quicker, or more effective to find out what your customers think about your brand. But not only!

Could you brief us on mysay research tool?

Mysay is a platform connecting businesses to consumers’ opinions. Users use our mobile app to answer questions and surveys floated by our businesses.

With mysay, businesses get accurate results within hours, for 1% of the cost of traditional research approaches.

What problem is mysay solving?

We started mysay because we were frustrated at how time consuming, difficult, and expensive it was to get accurate data on consumers’ preferences, needs and wants. We saw a great chasm between the businesses’ need in a fast-moving digital era, and the way traditional research is being done. We build mysay to bridge that gap, to make possible things that were not until now.

Can you give us an example of an aspect of research that mysay changed dramatically?

Mysay improved almost every aspect

A lot of the agency’s work is based on assumptions; some of them do focus groups, which are also limited in their representativeness. Mysay can help turn assumptions into certainty in record time, and very accurately.

of market research by a factor of 100x over the traditional model. Let’s say you’d like to ask a question to 1000 people, with mysay such an exercise is possible, and will cost you $125 and will yield results in a few hours. Obviously mysay is not limited to asking one question, you can also group questions into surveys etc.

So it brings 100x changes to reach, speed, and cost.

What are the things that were not possible before that are now feasible with mysay?

Anytime a new business model brings 100x changes to an existing practice, it makes things interesting, because things that were unimaginable before, suddenly become possible, unlocking new horizons to businesses. An agency wants to quickly get the opinion of millennials about a new logo? Done in less than two hours. An NGO or political party wants to monitor peoples’ weekly mood, or perception on an important political topic? Done at a fraction of what it would cost usually.

That is great, but doesn’t that come at cost to accuracy?

Not at all, on the contrary. Several factors affect accuracy, amongst which: data collection methodology, data entry, and also people’s propensity to lie during surveys. Mysay solves these problems by automating the entire process end to end. We also noticed that people are more comfortable expressing their honest opinion on mysay, especially on controversial matters, because they are completely anonymous.

For feedback to be valid it is essential to gather a truly representative sample of responses… Any innovation mysay brings here?

Excellent question. By gamifying surveys, mysay builds personas of users without knowing their identity. This approach allows us to segment users along an extremely large number of dimensions. I’ll give you an example, if you want to send a survey to 1,000 males living in Keserwan, earning above $3000/ month, with a preference for a specific car brand, and ski during the winter. That’s possible with mysay, and is super easy and quick.

It’s also worth noting that mysay has several sampling algorithms, for instance if your question is of political nature, we have an algo that automatically selects a representative sample.

Why is mysay important to advertising agencies?

A lot of the agency’s work is based on assumptions; some of them do focus groups, which are also limited in their representativeness. Mysay can help turn assumptions into certainty in record time, and very accurately. Even on matters as simple as picking the right logo for a brand, it used to be impractical to get the opinion of the brand’s target market; mysay changes that.

Another way agencies can benefit from mysay, is by getting consumers’ feedback on running or completed campaigns.

Lastly, mysay is an affordable service agencies can include in their pitches to clients.

How can you ensure that results are legitimate and credible? Before the Lebanese parliamentary elections when we had been live for two months, we were able to predict the names of 119 out of the 128 MPS. Now, and after 10 months live, we have even more maturity. We are able to accurately get market share of FMCG products in a matter of hours. Our returning customers include very large global brands, global NGOS, local FMCG distributors, alpha banks etc. These repeat customers have all done their due diligence on how accurate our results are.

What’s mysay’s edge vis-a-vis similar survey apps like Survey Monkey and many others?

Mysay’s approach and business model are fundamentally different from other digital survey tools. None of those has an engaged user base, nor do they offer sampling options. At a basic level, email survey’s samples are biased since the surveyor has to provide a mailing list. Those tools are great to get feedback from a known set of people, and are not built to be a market research tool.

There is also a big difference even on the user experience level, for instance, when you receive a request to answer a survey by email, you are generally not happy answering it, that’s If you do at all. Mysay’s users are on the app multiple times per day, and enjoy the experience of providing their opinion.