You should reconsider building your own consumer taste engine

“To build, or not to build?” is one of the most pressing questions that companies face as they navigate the innovations and strategic decisions required to stay ahead of the curve in today’s business landscape. As rapid adaptation and personalization become increasingly important to stay competitive, understanding and anticipating consumer preferences through advanced personalization technology is essential to enhance customer experience and drive business growth. Choosing Qloo’s ready-made solution will accelerate your time to market and reduce the opportunity cost of diverting critical resources from other essential projects. Let’s take a look at five reasons why you should reconsider building your own consumer taste engine and opt for Qloo’s solution instead.

1. Time to market

Personalization is now essential for staying competitive, and for good reason—it’s been shown to improve customer experience, increase engagement, and lead to higher customer retention. As a result, speed to market is more crucial than ever, especially as companies adapt to new consumer privacy regulations and the shift away from third-party cookies. Being the first to deliver genuinely personalized experiences to your audience can be the difference between leading the market and playing catch-up.

But building a solution from scratch is inherently time-consuming, and can often take longer than expected. According to a study published in Harvard Business Review, the average IT project overrun was 27%, but one in six projects had a cost overrun of 200% and a schedule overrun of almost 70%. Constructing an in-house platform comes at a serious cost — and it also takes necessary resources away from new product deployments, including the implementation of large language models and other generative AI strategies.

With Qloo, you’ll bypass the lengthy development phase and immediately gain a deep understanding of your target audiences. Whether you implement our API or use our self-serve SaaS tool, your organization will have access to our expansive and sophisticated Taste AI, delivering precise insights into global consumer preferences that are essential for crafting personalized experiences. This approach not only accelerates your time to market but also conserves in-house resources, allowing you to focus on other AI and LLM strategies without sacrificing developmental speed. Our platform is designed for easy integration with existing systems, reducing potential disruptions and ensuring a smooth transition.

2. Data depth and scope

While it’s crucial to accelerate your time to market, equally important is the quality of insights you leverage. Your organization likely has plenty of first-party data, but this information is often limited to a specific category, such as e-commerce transactions or online publisher data. But understanding taste goes far beyond what consumers have recently bought or watched; it requires dissecting a broad array of cultural preferences and behaviors. Over more than ten years, Qloo has developed a deep understanding of this complexity, turning it into a valuable and easily accessible resource for businesses.

Instead of dealing with the complex and costly process of adding third-party data from sources like Nielsen, Experian, or publishers’ data via clean rooms, Qloo’s extensive and proprietary database offers a simple solution. With over 575 million records of cultural entities, each enriched with extensive metadata attributes, we analyze taste components at a molecular level. This meticulous approach allows your business to apply personalization quickly and with unparalleled depth, using our advanced Taste AI to extract meaningful insights from a vast and regularly updated repository. With Qloo, your organization can learn beyond the constraints of limited first-party data and gain a wider, more detailed understanding of consumer behavior.

3. Data interpretation

Having an expansive database is essential, but turning raw data into actionable insights that inform business decisions is the real value of a consumer taste platform. At Qloo, we’ve spent over a decade fine-tuning our machine learning models to better understand consumer behavior. Our models have been continuously learning and improving, fed by our highly structured entity data and proprietary consumer behavior and sentiment database, giving our clients a competitive edge. Because our models have been trained to understand entities at a deep, conceptual level, Qloo’s Taste AI is able to make connections between seemingly disparate categories, like music and fashion. Our robust models also enable us to ingest highly specialized data and create customized solutions to meet your specific business needs.

Because Qloo’s intelligence is available via API, you’re also able to access unfiltered outputs, ensuring our platform doesn’t box you into rigid usage scenarios. This flexibility means that you can interpret and manipulate Qloo’s outputs to fit specific strategic objectives, making it an ideal solution for businesses seeking both depth in data analysis and the freedom to innovate in how they apply these insights.

4. Regulatory compliance

As data privacy is increasingly regulated, compliance with data privacy laws is critical for avoiding legal risks and penalties. It can also help build customer trust and alleviate any concerns your customers may have about how their data is being used. Having a platform that meets these requirements out of the box can significantly simplify operations, allowing you to focus on growth and innovation while maintaining the trust and confidence of your customers.

Qloo was built with compliance in mind—our Taste AI technology operates without relying on any Personally Identifiable Information (PII), and we are fully compliant with major data protection regulations like GDPR and CCPA. Partnering with Qloo ensures alignment with current customer privacy requirements and future-proofs your business for the evolving global data privacy landscape.

5. Cost implications

When deciding whether to develop an in-house consumer taste platform or to adopt a ready-made solution like Qloo’s Taste AI, it’s crucial to look beyond fixed costs and consider the opportunity costs of diverting your technology leadership’s focus from other critical areas. As tech leaders are tasked with a growing number of priorities, especially with increasing pressure to integrate advanced AI capabilities, let Qloo provide your organization with a detailed understanding of your customers’ tastes so that your team can focus on other initiatives.

Qloo’s pricing model provides cost predictability while freeing up your internal teams to focus on broader business challenges. While some technology leaders may be hesitant to depend on any specific vendor, Qloo’s platform is designed to mitigate these concerns. We provide the freedom to integrate our engine into your existing systems without the drawbacks typically associated with vendor exclusivity, ensuring that you retain control over your technology strategy while benefiting from our deep expertise.

Ready to get started? Contact us to learn more about what Qloo can do for your business.