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.
Mobile customers have the potential to change our business in profound ways. Advanced mobile communications is coming of age at a time when other technologies and societal shifts are working in parallel to radically transform whole industries. Some of these shifts have shown up in the marketing realm in the form of social media, customer
If you have not visited the SAS Customer Intelligence (CI) web page lately - please take a look and let us know what you think. It's been redesigned to give you a better experience when you visit - flatter navigation, more visual appeal and (my favorite) your point of view. Your
I consider myself lucky to have confirmed first-hand that Nate Silver is a relatively smart guy. He most recently published a book, The Signal and the Noise: Why So Many Predictions Fail – but Some Don’t, and he is particularly well known for accurately predicting the outcome of the 2012
Online marketers all want the same thing - for our customers to get what they want, when they want it, and with the fewest clicks possible. We already know that satisfied customers usually return, and now they share their experiences so the stakes have never been higher to get it
The digital world we live in gives marketers the opportunity to capture, record, measure, analyze and report just about anything nowadays - and we do it! Clicks, conversions, likes, attrition, business drivers, value destroyers - you name it and it's all fair game. Therein lies the rub - it's all fair game, and that's what's putting
Each fall, SAS Customer Intellience (CI) customers gather at SAS global headquarters for the SAS CI Customer Connection. It's a great opportunity you to interact with your peers in other companies and to gain firsthand knowledge on how to make the most of your CI investment in three important ways: Much of the event is planned to give you many
Content plays a critical multifaceted role in marketing today - simultaneously beckoning and informing your customers at any given time. Content imparts details, stirs emotions and sways decisions. And when created and promoted correctly, content fuels a sales funnel whose narrow end points to the shangri-la of closed sales and happy customers. And
It's Valentine's Day - a day widely associated with love, or at least as a day for acknowledging love. It's celebrated world-wide with offers of candies, flowers, poetry and many other ways to make it very clear how you feel. While observed around the world, Wikipedia notes that it's a working day in most countries. And
On advantage of being a marketer at SAS right now is that we have a roughly 35-year head start on our competitors in terms of helping organizations manage big data. And because much of big data is driven by customer data, marketing is ground zero for big data in most organizations.
This post originally appeared in our SAS Voices blog, published by my colleague and fellow blogger Courtney Peters. It's a great story about how Oberweis Dairy harnessed the power of marketing analytics to cultivate loyalty. That effort has helped them grow from a family-owned dairy farm to a major regional food manufacturer
