The use of Chatbots, AI and surveys have exploded over the past several years, as brands endeavor to offer customers more personal, careful solutions - at scale. 

And, as data and privacy issues (namely the elimination of 3rd party cookies) expands, fist party (& zero party) data coming from owned channels become essential for marketers.

Asics has gone back to basics in adding an interactive chat to its Website. The personalized survey is designed around “discovering your runner type,” asking questions about exercise habits, goals and fitness. The result of the survey for the customer is a profile and recommended shoe type. For the brand, it’s about building up more detailed data sets.

In a world with 3rd party cookies, collecting this type of data was effectively outsourced to the ad networks. Moving forward the onus is shifting back to the brand to collect customer profiles and scale these data.

In a world of sophisticated Chatbots and AI, the Asics interactive survey (on its own Website) is pretty basic. The lessons for brands who do not yet have good solutions for collecting customer insights is that; it’s often better to implement a simple, straightforward solution quickly than to take too long engineering something overly complex.

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