Saigon Dating Project is a 3-month experimental project by a group of thirteen Vietnamese youths studying all over the globe to explore the dating and romantic relationship landscape in Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam. Our aims are to understand people’s dating behaviors and preferences specific to Ho Chi Minh City (HCMC), Vietnam with its very own culture and way of life. Even though “brand name” apps such as Tinder, Bumble and OkCupid have their presence in HCMC, their difficulty in catering for the Vietnamese audience partially explains their stigmatization and slow growth in this city. Therefore, as a predominantly HCMC-native group of young people, many of whom have been exposed to the Western cultures where dating apps are the new normal, we want to learn more about our own culture and people, and thus try out our ideas in the form of social media campaigns and dating events to see what works and what doesn’t.

To accomplish this goal, we develop a Qualtrics survey which covers a wide range of topics, from demographics, personal preferences when it comes to dating partners to a personality test based on pop-psychological classification systems, namely Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI) and Five Love Languages. Towards the end of the survey, we have an optional section where we dive deep into the respondents sense of self, their concerns and challenges when it comes to romantic relationships and their opinions on dating programs/organizations. The number of responses that we have received so far exceeds our modest initial expectations, with more than 500 responses from various demographic groups.

The way Saigon Dating Project works is that, once the users respond to our survey, their responses will then go into two separate processes:

  1. Marketing Data Analytics: The respondent’s personal information such as e-mail addresses are removed from the exported data in order to maintain anonymity. The data will be visualized and analyzed to:
    • inform the team of how to proceed with our upcoming activities;
    • inform the audience about the dating trends and preferences for educational purposes.
  2. Users Matching: The respondent’s profile is matched with top 5 most compatible profiles using our algorithm built with Python. This compatibility score calculation are based on two pop-psychological classification systems, namely Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI) and Five Love Languages. After matches are produced, a certain number of random couples are invited to our event taking place in HCMC.

The roles I play in this project include Co-Project Manager, Human Resources Officer and Marketing Data Analyst. My main analytical tool for this project is R and its ggplot2 package.

For more information about the project, visit Saigon Dating Project.

This repository contains data reports and visualizations from our Marketing data analyses as we go. For codes, visit my Github.