Welcome to The Brand Surgeon’s panel management system [ live.thebrandsurgeon.co.za ] .By using our community site and joining as a member of Brand Surgeon Surveys.
You agree to participate in the survey(s) or studies provided by or hosted by The Brand Surgeon. You also agree to the terms and conditions of the rewards programs when participating in any survey or study provided or hosted by the Brand Surgeon. You agree to these Terms of Use and Membership (“Terms”) and confirm that you have read and understood our privacy policy (“Privacy Policy”).
Our Privacy Policy sets out how the Brand Surgeon collects, uses and stores your personal information and a copy can be found here. If you do not agree to the Terms and the Privacy Policy, please do not continue using this Site.
The Brand Surgeon reserves the right, in its sole discretion, to change, modify, add or remove portions of these Terms and Condition or our Privacy Policy, at any time. It is your responsibility to periodically check these Terms and Conditions as well as our Privacy Policy for changes. We will post a notice on our website alerting users of any changes and also include those changes under the privacy policies on our database management system. Your continued use of this Site following the posting of such changes will mean that you accept and agree to these changes. Provided you comply with these Terms and Conditions, The Brand Surgeon grants you a personal, non-exclusive, non-transferable, limited privilege to enter and use this Site.
REGISTRATION: In order for an account to be established in your name and any REWARDS properly credited to your account, you must fill in the online registration form. To be an account holder, you must supply The Brand Surgeon with complete and valid contact information, including your full legal name, home address, telephone number, and valid email address, and all other requested information. Your account must have a unique and valid email address and password.
You agree to provide only accurate, recent, and complete registration information and to keep that information updated to ensure accuracy. The Brand Surgeon may suspend your membership and you may forfeit your REWARDS if you fail to keep your personal information accurate and complete, or if you try to duplicate your registration more than one time. You may only have one registration per ID / passport number / unique individual registration on our platform.
You are solely in charge of the security of your details and any activity that occurs under your membership account, whether authorized or unauthorized. By joining as a member of The Brand Surgeon, you consent to receiving invitations to participate in Surveys via email or SMS. The Brand Surgeon does not guarantee that you will receive a certain minimum volume of invitations, surveys, or other offers. ELIGIBILITY Membership in any The Brand Surgeon is free and is open to individuals only (not corporations or other business entities) that are at least 18 years of age. You are ONLY permitted to have ONE account. However, we do need individuals within SMES and organisations to participate in Business to Business research and this information will be requested if you qualify for that type of research. RELATIONSHIP You are responsible for providing any computer equipment and communications services necessary to connect to and access this Site. You agree that neither your membership on The Brand Surgeon nor your completion of any Surveys for The Brand Surgeon and its clients creates any partnership or employment relationship, and that your completion of Surveys is strictly as an independent contractor. You also agree the REWARDS or other incentives you receive for completing Surveys are the only compensation you will receive for your completion of Surveys. However, if rewards are allocated to your account, we reserve the right to remove them if it turns out that: You have not completed the survey or research task adequately. You have duplicate profiles and are trying to defraud us by completing more than once – this is fraudulent. You try to complete multiple surveys on one device as yourself which constitutes fraud. CODE OF CONDUCT: The Brand Surgeon is an online community dedicated to gathering consumer feedback and opinions to leading providers of products and services. When you use and post content on The Brand Surgeon Site or our community, we ask that you observe the following rules: Respect the opinions of others and behave in a respectful manner. Be consistent in your responses. Do not access or use any part of the Site for anything other than your personal, non-commercial use. Do not share or resell your Brand Surgeon REWARDS to other members. Do not publish or make reference in any media to any Survey or Site content without our prior written permission. Do not collect or store any personal information about other members. Do not communicate with The Brand Surgeon Help Desk in a manner which is harmful. Do not engage in any other activity that the Company reasonably deems improper or abusive. Failure to comply with this Code of Conduct may result in termination of your membership account and forfeiture of any REWARDS. You are not allowed to share any of the following: Personal information such as financial information. Material that promotes illegal activity or political, religious, ideological beliefs. Personal attacks or anything that is illegal or invasive of someone else’s privacy. Market or promote any products or services. Any content that infringes any patent, copyright, trademark, trade secret or other intellectual property right of another. CONTENT SHARING Whenever you make use of a feature that allows you to upload content to our Site, you must comply with the content standards set out in our Content Rules. Any content you upload to our Site will be considered non-confidential and non-proprietary. You retain all of your ownership rights in your User Content, but you grant us and other users of the Site (such as our clients) a non-exclusive license to use, store and copy that User Content and to distribute and make it available to third parties. We also have the right to disclose your identity to any third party who is claiming that any User Content posted or uploaded by you to our Site constitutes a violation of their intellectual property rights, or of their right to privacy. Notice: The views and content expressed by other users on our website or any social media or other platforms do not represent our values. CONTENT RULES If you upload any User Content to the Site, you agree to comply with the following terms of use at all times: Not posting or uploading any User Content or use the Site in a way that breaches any law. Not posting or uploading any personal information about other individuals, without their full and clear consent. Agreeing not to contribute User Content that will infringe another organisations or person’s rights (including intellectual property rights and rights of privacy). You agree that you have all the necessary rights and permissions to publish the User Content you submit to the Site. You are wholly responsible for all User Content posted by you on the Site (including, but not limited to, emails / SMS or other communication sent by you in connection to the Site). We reserve the right to remove or edit, or require you to edit, User Content posted to the Site at any time. MEMBER CONTENT AND LICENSE You agree to supply a non-exclusive, perpetual, unlimited, royalty-free licence to The Brand Surgeon to use for any objective any content you hand over to this Site. CONFIDENTIALITY OF SURVEY The Brand Surgeon’s clients may share confidential, commercially sensitive, and proprietary information and materials to you as part of Surveys, and such information and materials shall remain the sole and property of its owner. This confidential information may include, but is not limited to, new services, new product ideas or concepts, packaging concepts, advertising, and the text, visual images and sounds related thereto. By becoming a member, you agree that you will keep the contents and materials disclosed to you as part of all Surveys in which you participate confidential at all times, and not share them with any third party or use the confidential information for any purpose other than the purpose of completing the Survey. REWARDS OVERVIEW What are REWARDS? The Brand Surgeon values our member’s feedback and participation, and to show our appreciation and in recognition of this, The Brand Surgeon offers incentives in the form of credits, which are called REWARDS. These are added to your account by The Brand Surgeon only for SUCCESSFUL completion of feedback surveys, telephone calls, videos, online groups, in home visits, mystery shopping or any other form of research feedback. REWARDS are redeemable for cash, vouchers and other prizes. Earning REWARDS REWARDS will be credited to your account only through your participation in activities authorized by The Brand Surgeon, which include, but are not limited to, registration as a panelist, completion of demographic profiles and completion of qualitative or quantitative marketing research activities performed by The Brand Surgeon, and only in accordance with the specific incentive offer disclosed for each activity. The Brand Surgeon is dedicated to providing quality data to our clients. To ensure this level of quality, please note that you might not qualify for all Surveys, in which case, the Survey will close. The reasons you might not qualify include but are not limited to: Your profile not corresponding to our client’s target demographic. Inconsistencies of responses (rushed, back check questions not lining up etc.). Dishonest responses or false answers. Attempts to duplicate the surveys in order to get paid twice (fraud). Harmful or abusive replies. Any other attempted fraud like one person doing multiple surveys on different devices etc. Redeeming REWARDS You can see your REWARDS at any time by going to the Rewards tab on the main page. REWARDS are awarded for qualifying and quality Survey completion, Profile completion, and other participation on this Site. REWARDS automatically convert to cash values whenever you request a payment but only when there are 500 reward points available (10 rewards = R1). Rewards will be allocated within 5 working days of the completion of a project. Note that we sometimes have to wait a few days for clients to verify the quality of the survey information. However, if we allocate REWARDS to a participant and the client comes back and tells us that there is a quality issue with a survey, we reserve the right to remove those rewards from a profile, as your feedback then becomes redundant and cannot be used. Removal of Rewards All rewards are subject to change as may be necessary to comply with applicable laws or regulations and we reserve the right to void vouchers or rewards where such laws or regulations dictate that we must do so, or where we can show fraud or lack of quality or time spent completing a survey or research task. If you are blacklisted from our system for doing fraudulent surveys or tasks or bad quality surveys, you forfeit any or all REWARDS owed to you. Vouchers If you request a voucher (e.g., airtime or other), The Brand Surgeon will make the voucher code available via electronic means within 5 working days of your request. Electronic vouchers (e-vouchers) will either be sent to your Brand Surgeon account, or to the email address within your member profile in your account. We need maximum10 working days to process these vouchers. Please make sure that we have your correct email address at all times to avoid any delays in delivery. We will not be held responsible for delays in payments if you have given us the wrong email address. Any request to resend a missing voucher must be made within 1 (one) month from when the voucher was originally sent. The Brand Surgeon will not process any orders after expiry of this one-month time limit. INTELLECTUAL PROPERTY This Site is protected by intellectual property laws, and you agree to respect them. All rights not expressly granted to you are reserved by The Brand Surgeon or its licensors. Notice: All content on this Site is subject to intellectual property rights, contractual or other protection. The intellectual property rights are owned by us or our licensors. No Content may be copied, distributed, republished, uploaded, posted or transmitted in any way except pursuant to the express provisions of these Terms or with our prior consent. Modification or use of the Content is granted to users and all title and or rights remain with us. DISCLAIMER AND WARRANTY By utilizing The Brand Surgeon REWARDS Program, you acknowledge and agree that The Brand Surgeon is not a bank or any other kind or form of financial institution and that “REWARDS” credited to your account are not actual cash deposits, do not earn interest, and are only account entries that entitle you to the amount of the credited REWARDS if you redeem them in conformity with these Terms and Conditions. You agree that you may only redeem the amounts in your account according to the procedures explained in these terms of use, which we may amend every now and then. The Brand Surgeon disclaims all warranties, conditions and duties, express, implied or statutory, including but not limited to any implied warranties, duties or conditions: (1) of merchantability or satisfactory quality, of fitness for a particular purpose or use, of results, and of accuracy or completeness or with respect to the privacy or security of information you share on the site with other members; and (2) created by trade usage, course of dealing or course of performance. AGREEMENT These Terms, including items incorporated into them (e.g., PoPi and other Privacy Policies), as well as any additional terms or conditions contained on the Site for particular activities, and disclosures provided by us and consents provided by you on the Site, constitute the entire agreement between us and neither party has relied on any representations made by the other that are not expressly set forth in the Entire Agreement. If any provision of the Entire Agreement is found by a court of competent jurisdiction to be invalid, illegal or unenforceable it shall be deemed changed to the minimum extent necessary to make it valid, legal and enforceable. If such change is not possible, the relevant provision or part-provision shall be deemed deleted. Any modification to or deletion of a provision or part-provision under shall not affect the credibility and enforceability of the rest of these Terms and Conditions and the remaining provisions will remain in full force and effect, provided that the allocation of risks described herein is given effect to the fullest extent possible. Our failure to act with respect to a breach does not waive our right to act with respect to subsequent or similar breaches, and time is of the essence of the Entire Agreement. COPYRIGHT INFRINGEMENT The Brand Surgeon respects the intellectual property rights of others and requests that you do the same. Anyone who believes that their work has been reproduced in this Site in a way constituting copyright infringement may provide a notice to our General Counsel containing the following: The address, telephone number, and, if available, an email address at which the complaining party may be contacted. Identification of the copyrighted work claimed to have been infringed. An electronic or physical signature. Nature of the copyright owner or a person authorized to act on behalf of the owner of the copyright. Identification of the material that is claimed to be infringing and information reasonably sufficient to permit us to locate the material. ADDITIONAL INFORMATION. Notification If prizes are awarded (as opposed to rewards being issued), all prize winners will be notified by email of their winnings within 48 hours after the draw and should receive their REWARDS within 24 hours after notification. Any prize winner may be required to complete and return an Affidavit of Eligibility and a Liability Release to The Brand Surgeon (if we so deem necessary). This will be made clear in the notification email, and we must receive this documentation within three weeks of initial notification, or a prize winner will forfeit their winnings and an alternate winner will be selected by random drawing. Release of Liability The Brand Surgeon and clients affiliated with Surveys are not in any way responsible for lost, late, or misdirected entries or for any damage or loss resulting from; Printing errors, technical errors related to computers, servers, providers, or telephone or network line, Late, lost, or undelivered mail, if any, are the sole responsibility of the prize winner. By accepting the prize, the winner waives the right to assert as a cost of winning said prize or rewards, any and all costs of redemption or travel to redeem said prize and any and all liability that might arise from redeeming or seeking said prize. ACCOUNT TERMINATION If your membership or your access to the Site is cancelled or suspended for any reason, you may not access the Website without our prior written consent. As mentioned previously, all REWARDS in your profile will be forfeited. OPT OUT If you OPT OUT and the amount of the REWARDS is below 500 points, you will forfeit those rewards. IF you OPT OUT, you may OPT back in at any time **Privacy Policy** POPIA (The Protection of Personal Information Act, Act No. 4 of 2013) and POPI (the Protection of personal Information) Who are we? The Brand Surgeon is a South African based research company who do qualitative and quantitative market research online research panel where consumers give our clients’ feedback in exchange for a reward. We deliver high-quality market research data to clients who are in various business industries, including other market research agencies. We maintain online and face to face consumer panels and research surveys, providing real-time digital consumer insights to our clients via our market research surveys and analytics platforms. The Brand Surgeon is a company with whom you register as a member, and we are responsible for your personal data. What is POPI? The Protection of Personal Information (POPI) Act (No. 4 of 2013) is a governmental regulation designed to protect the personal information of South African citizens, similar to the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) in Europe. If we are collecting personal information of SA citizens (for instance, through interviews or focus groups, or surveys that collect identifiers such as names, contact information, etc.), The Protection of Personal Information Act (POPI) regulates how we handle your personal information while we do our work as a market research consultancy. POPI stands for Protection of Personal Information. Regardless of whether there is a law or not, The Brand Surgeon needs to ensure that the Personal Information we capture, manage and store, is secure. It makes common, logical sense that this information is sensitive, and shouldn't be exposed. One of the principles that we all should consider is "privacy by design". This means that we consider privacy implications in all our processes and systems and build security and privacy concepts into the day-to-day operation within the Brand Surgeon. POPI is all about Privacy, and this means security. In order to secure information, we have systems and structures in place to understand what information is gathered and how it is kept. The core focus of POPI in a research context is ensuring that if personal identifiers must be collected, they need to be stored in a secure, access-controlled location to prevent the data being harvested and used by third parties. POPI does not prevent open data sharing - in fact, open data sharing, by virtue of the need to remove personal identifiers from shared datasets, complies entirely with POPI. In research, POPI impacts more on research process, such as being strategic in storing only de-identified datasets on cloud storage, and ensuring that on-site storage (personal hard drives, external hard drives, the UCT G Drive) is strictly access-controlled to named and designated individuals to ensure data protection. POPI is intended to balance 2 competing interests, these are: Your constitutional right to privacy (which requires your personal information to be protected): and The needs of our company to have access to and to use your personal information for legitimate research purposes, for example, to enable us to do our work for you. POPI obliges us to inform you of our process. What is POPIA? POPIA stands for the Protection of Personal Information Act, Act No. 4 of 2013 or POPI Act. This is the new law and is something that most (if not all organisations, including The Brand Surgeon) will need to follow. The difference between POPI and POPIA is that POPI is the act of protecting Personal Information. This implies that all the policies, procedures, processes and practices in the Brand Surgeon relating to personal information, are in fact doing POPI. In order to comply with POPIA, we needed to implement a POPI programme. In order to implement it, there were a number of steps which need to be followed and a number of documents and instruments which were developed. What is our Privacy obligation to you? We value your privacy and are dedicated to protecting your personal information. This privacy notice describes how we collect, use, share and secure your personal data on www.thebrandsurgeon.co.za. It also describes your privacy rights and how laws that are applicable to you may protect you and is intended to add to other notices and privacy policies. Personal data we collect? Personal data means any information about an individual from which that person can be identified. It does not include data where the identity has been removed. We may collect, use, store and transfer different kinds of personal data about you which we have grouped together follows: Contact data: email address and telephone number. Identity data: name, date of birth, marital status, gender, panelist id and username. Demographic: interests, preferences; age, marital status, gender, birthday, household size, income, education and employment status. Special categories of personal data: ethnic/racial origin, health, genetics. Pseudonymised data: are identifiable data as unique identifiers (e.g. panelist ID’s). Public forums and blogs Our website and platform securely hold your information and not publicly accessible except a respondents own personal profile (accessed via a login name and password). You should be informed that any information you offer can be read, collected, and used by third parties and other research clients. We strongly discourage you from disclosing any of your personal data in any public forum or community area that you may find on the site and in particular, we would never ask you to provide your Contact details or Identity data on a public community area, even if it was part of a survey. Who do we share your personal data with? Feedback we gather from you via our surveys, online panels and face to face research is delivered to our clients either in anonymised and aggregated form or in pseudonymised form. If we give the results in anonymised and aggregated form, the results involve data about groups of individuals and not on an individual level. If we supply the results in pseudonymised form, the results will be on an individual basis, using unique identifiers, such as your assigned panellist ID, but will not include your Identity data or Contact data. What other ways can you become a member of our panel? We may make accessible a service either directly or through third parties by which you can receive messages on your wireless device via short message service. Your provider’s standard data and messaging rates apply to all SMS correspondence. All charges are billed by and payable to your mobile service provider. You represent that you are the owner or authorised user of the wireless device on which messages will be received and that you are authorised to accept the applicable charges. What cookies do we use on our site? We employ cookies on our site to distinguish you from other account holder of our site and estimate visits and click throughs for specific campaigns. This helps us to offer you a good experience when you navigate our site and also allows us to improve our site. These cookies expire when your browsing session ends. By continuing to browse the site, you are agreeing to our use of cookies. A cookie is a small file of letters and numbers that we store on your browser or the hard drive of your computer if you agree. Cookies contain information that is transferred to your computer’s hard drive. What are other Tracking Technologies? Surveys – client cookie tracking, including for Ad effectiveness campaigns. Each respondent is given a unique ID by ourselves, who may write, set or read cookies or use other Technical data about you from multiple locations, including our own servers or systems. If you participate, your ID will be stored or associated with those technical data to allow us and/or our clients to conduct online survey campaigns, track your visits to websites, use your demographic/ profile data to create look-a-like segments and/or gain other online insights about you. If you have interacted with the online ad or promotion, our client will send you ID and the specific survey to us and we may provide you with the opportunity to complete the survey. Technologies Automated technologies or interactions. As you interact with the site, we will automatically collect technical data about your equipment, browsing actions and patterns. We collect this technical data by using cookies, server logs, digital finger printing technologies and other similar technologies. We may also receive technical data about you if you visit other websites employing our cookies. Fingerprinting technologies: In general, digital Fingerprinting technologies assign a unique identifier or “Machine-ID” to a user’s computer to identify and track your device. The Technology will analyse publicly available information and data obtained from your computer’s web browser and from other publicly available data points, including the technical settings of your computer, the characteristics of your computer, and its IP Address, to create a unique identifier, which will be assigned to your device. We use the Technology for quality control, validation, and fraud detection and prevention purposes, including assisting us in ensuring the integrity of survey results. Appropriate technical and operational processes and procedures will be put in place to ensure that the technology is safe, secure and does not cause undue privacy or data security risks and the technology will be used and distributed in a professional and ethical manner. What is our reward cashing in policy and prize winner’s policy and privacy guarantee? Members and others who take our surveys are usually issued reward points and when they reach 500 points, they can cash these in via our cash out system. In the event of a randomly selected prize being offered to one or more winners, to win prizes for participation in surveys, content, and other promotions, all winners are notified by email or via our site of their winnings. The Brand Surgeon shall post the usernames of winners on our site and on our own blogs and newsletters. For more information, please visit our Terms and Conditions page. Cash and other prizes awarded to non-members will be awarded directly. What security measures do we undertake to protect your personal data? We have put in place appropriate security measures to prevent your personal data from being accidentally lost, used or accessed in an unauthorised way, altered or disclosed. In addition, we limit access to your personal data to those employees, agents, contractors and other third parties who have a business need to know. They will only process your personal data on our instructions, and they are subject to a duty of confidentiality. Although we do everything, we can keep your data safe, unfortunately no systems can guarantee they are 100% secure. If you have questions about the security of your personal data, or if you have reason to believe that the personal data that we hold about you is no longer secure, please contact us immediately as described in this Privacy Notice. We have put in place procedures to deal with any suspected personal data breach and will notify you and any applicable regulator or supervisory authority of a breach where we are legally required to do so. Should you have any issues with the way in which we are processing your personal information, you are entitled to lodge a complaint with the Information Regulator, whose contact details are: 33 Hoofd Street Forum III, 3rd Floor Braampark P.O Box 31533 Braamfontein, Johannesburg, 2017 Complaints email: complaints.IR@justice.gov.za General enquiries email: inforeg@justice.gov.za. What are our data retention and destruction policies? How long will you use my personal data for? We will only retain your personal data for as long as necessary to fulfil the purposes we gathered it for, including for the purposes of satisfying any legal, accounting, or reporting requirements. To determine the appropriate retention period for personal data, we consider the amount, nature, and sensitivity of the personal data, the potential risk of harm from unauthorised use or disclosure of your personal data, the purposes for which we process your personal data and whether we can achieve those purposes through other means, and the applicable legal requirements. How do you access your information? When requested, The Brand Surgeon will supply you with details about whether we hold any of your personal data on our platform. You may access your information at any time via your unique login and password (which you have created), rectify, or request deletion of your personal data, or cancel your membership by logging into your Member Account. By following the appropriate directions, your details should be automatically updated or deleted in our database. Data Retention If you cancel your membership, we will no longer use your personal data to contact you, but in conformity with our backup procedures, we will retain your personal data until your personal data are eventually destroyed in accordance with our data retention and destruction policies and we will continue to use the security procedures and technologies to keep your personal data safe. You have the right of access to your personal information on the Brand Surgeon research platform and the right to correct any errors relating to the information that we have on record. In addition, you have the right to object to us continuing to process your personal information and request us to remove your personal information. In this regard, please note that if you do exercise this right, we you will not be able to do any further paid market research projects for us, and we will remove you from the platform and cease to contact you. You will also forfeit any rewards under 500 points. Any above 500 points you may cash out prior to unsubscribing, but not after you have unsubscribed. When you unsubscribe, you remove the right to cash any rewards out as your information and project history will be removed and unattainable. Will I get spam as a result of joining The Brand Surgeon? No. Our respondent platform has been created solely for marketing research purposes and your personal information will not be shared nor sold to third parties. Your contact details will only be used by The Brand Surgeon for research. For more information, read our Privacy Policy. Changes to the privacy notice The Brand Surgeon has the right to change this privacy statement at any moment, you have the sole responsibility to review it constantly. If we do decide to change our privacy notice, we will post those changes to this privacy statement on the homepage, or other places we deem appropriate so that you are aware of what information we collect, how we use it, and under what circumstances, if any, we disclose it. If we make material changes to this policy, we will notify you here, by email, or by means of a notice on our home page prior to the change becoming effective. It is important that the personal data we hold about you is accurate and updated. Please keep your Account details updated if your personal data changes during your relationship with us. Privacy contact details We trust that our processing of your personal information will be handled in a way that complies with all the relevant laws and that your rights to privacy will be protected as required by law and within the South African Market Research protocols. We are dedicated to attending to your queries and if you are a The Brand Surgeon member and have questions about this, please email us at [survey@thebrandsurgeon.co.za](mailto:survey@thebrandsurgeon.co.za)
