Background
Critical Mix is a computer programming company that serves the marketing research industry. We develop software to administer online surveys, provide real-time reporting of the collected data, and various other related tools. But we don't sell this software; we provide it as a service. We program surveys for our clients and help them manage the online data collection aspect of their research projects.
Our clients are full-service research and consulting organizations. Some outsource most or all of their programming needs to us. Others use us for overflow work or for particularly complex studies. Critical Mix is a best-in-class service provider focused on one core competency: the programming and hosting of online research studies.
What are the benefits of Software as a Service (SaaS)?
With Critical Mix, you always get the latest software with the most up-to-date features and capabilities. It is our opinion that there are too many limitations in most commercially available web surveying packages. Even if complex questionnaires can be handled by such packages, they typically require a significant amount of computer programming knowledge for successful implementation.
- You don't have to make a capital purchase of hardware or pay annual license fees for the software; you pay-per-use (per project)
- You don't have to purchase or manage the firewalls, load balancers, and application and database servers required to host a sophisticated web application
- You don't have to hire personnel to manage the hardware or program the surveys, and then train them, motivate them, and provide career opportunities for them
- You don't have to burden your researchers, project managers and consultants with responsibilities that are not directly relevant to the core competencies of your business.
With Critical Mix...
Programming and hosting online surveys is a service that is difficult, expensive, and not necessarily advantageous to bring in-house. Critical Mix seeks to partner with our clients for the long-term so that they can instead focus on the methodologies and analytics that give them competitive advantages in their markets.
Our name comes from a marketing term, the marketing mix, which includes the four "Ps" of marketing: product, place, price, and promotion. Marketing researchers are always looking for that critical combination of marketing mix elements required for brand success: the critical mix.