Hi, I'm John Balla - I co-founded the SAS Customer Intelligence blog and served as Editor for five years. I held a number of marketing roles at SAS as Content Strategist, Industry Field Marketing and as Go-to-Marketing Lead for our Customer Intelligence Solutions. I like to find and share content and experiences that open doors, answer questions, and sometimes challenge assumptions so better questions can be asked. Outside of work I am an avid downhill snow skier, hiker and beach enthusiast. I stay busy with my family, volunteering for civic causes, keeping my garden green, striving for green living, expressing myself with puns, and making my own café con leche every morning. I’ve lived and worked on 3 contents and can communicate fluently in Spanish, Portuguese, Hungarian and get by with passable English. Prior to SAS, my experience in marketing ranges from Fortune 100 companies to co-founding two start ups. I studied economics at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and got an MBA from Georgetown. Follow me on Twitter. Connect with me on LinkedIn.
Technology has dramatically changed the way people communicate, do business and generally lead their lives. It’s increasingly online, and it’s increasingly mobile. In turn, those technologies have created tons of data-driven marketing opportunities, and it turns out that there are some recurring themes in how CMOs are leading the charge. Big
I have a challenge for you - guess which of these three email offers below are what I consider "sloppy marketing." Base your decision on these demographics- the recipient is a 50-year old married male with two kids at home, has stable employment, is a homeowner with a good credit rating, active
Who doesn't love a side-by-side taste test? You get to choose for yourself - awesome! For me, the ultimate taste test is the Pepsi Challenge (Pepsi Cola vs. Coca-Cola), a key feature of the "Cola Wars" since 1975. It's very simple and very effective - even for the audience. So for
It’s very telling that every Walmart greeter has an inviting phrase emblazoned across the back: “How may I help you?” That simple question and the presence of the greeters in the stores speaks eloquently to the customer-centricity of Walmart, which has been instilled in their organizational culture from the very
How do you feel when someone is talking at you? It's not quite the same as someone talking to you, is it? When someone talks to you, they might be using your language or even matching your rhythm. By contrast, someone talking at you seems like they're more interested in what they want to say and less on what you want to
Have you ever tried to find something quickly in a book? Say it's a book you've never read before - how do you approach it? You look first for the table of contents, right? We've all done it hundreds of times - if you scan the table of contents, you should quickly figure out what
The issue of data privacy has gotten a lot of attention lately, thanks in part to revelations by Edward Snowden and his kiss-and-tell with the press about several top-secret United States and British government mass surveillance programs. It doesn't matter that this is not a new issue, nor that his revelations specifically
My wife often jokes about the early years of our marriage, when her perspective was "what's mine is mine and what's your's is mine." And my retort is usually, "I learned early to understand exactly who's the boss." Fortunately, it wasn't exactly like that, but we both agree we each started out
One of the most often repeated quotes in business is, "If you can't measure it, you can't manage it." It's attributed to the late management consultant Peter Drucker, and it's become so ingrained in business parlance that it's almost cliché. And people still say it for one simple reason - it's true. Even in
So many companies today describe themselves as "leading edge," or they strive to achieve excellence or market leadership. And we all have our own ideas of companies that are leading edge, as well as the companies that may once have been market leaders and for any number of reasons have
