Runner’s High: How ASICS is Personalizing the Customer Journey One Mile at a Time

As retailers continually adjust to the global pandemic, they’re tasked with building upon what’s already been a rapid pace of digital transformation. The sudden shift in customer behavior — from in-store to digital — had businesses of all kinds adjusting their products and services to keep things going. Now, retail’s new normal endures through a reconstructed view of how to utilize technology — specifically, captured data. In this new digital age of marketing, businesses should listen to customer expectations by putting transparency, personalization, and experience at the forefront of everything, or risk losing the customer all together.

Research shows how marketing strategies with an emphasis on personalized, self-declared data will have better interactions with customers. When companies produce relatable content and messaging, and personalized experiences, it all works together to make the customer feel as if their interests matter.

Sports equipment company ASICS originally didn’t have its best foot forward when it came to personalization. With our data expertise, the brand completely redesigned its customer data architecture to consolidate its first-party data together across channels and focus on insightful psychographics and lifestyle data. By partnering with Jebbit, ASICS worked to improve these capabilities using quiz commerce.

Quiz commerce (or conversational commerce) is set to dominate the retail industry moving forward. It's the technique of using entertaining interactions that are personalized at all stages of the customer journey, from engagement and product education to conversion. Businesses are using technology to conduct quiz commerce, which are easily created and embedded product match quizzes, surveys, personality quizzes or lead forms on their websites, mobile apps and digital ads. While businesses receive first-party, declared data and valuable psychographic marketing insights, consumers are treated with an entertaining and unobtrusive way to learn about products, answer questions, and find products best suited to their needs and personality.

During the collaborative Jebbit and ASICS campaign, “What type of runner are you?,” it was important to capture data quickly to start mapping out customer profiles which could then be used to sell products. To do this, the campaign worked to match consumers with their runner type through declared lifestyle and psychographic data. It was also necessary to keep a high engagement rate within the surveys and prevent fatigue, another reason ASICS turned to Jebbit. The athletic brand did this by providing an interactive digital conversation that gathered qualified insights into a customer’s running routine while they, in return, learn about themselves and identify with a personal motto.

Working with Jebbit, ASICS learned the path to personalization comes from collecting the right data to improve customer experience. Consumers that willingly share information via interactive brand experiences bring deeper engagement and trust. The retail industry understands how important first-party data is, and how hard it can be to capture. It's an opportunity to predict the buying cycle and provide the content to support it. Scaled data is very efficient, very powerful, and the future of the retail industry.

ASICS’ campaign garnered a 90 percent completion rate, a 70 percent website redirect rate, 45,000-plus personas captures (91 percent unique), and 21.5 data points per profile. The brand's success will continue by using first-party customer data.

Pamela Erlichman is the chief marketing officer at Jebbit, a company that creates interactive digital experiences that capture first-party data at scale.