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.
By and large, marketers are an optimistic lot. We're often big extroverts with big ideas, laying grand plans and generally having a good time along the way. Our view of the future is usually rosy, with all sorts of reasons to hope for the best and reach for the stars.
Over the last decade, five companies have emerged with the potential to aggressively reshape the landscape of multiple industries – and to change life as we know it. They are the "Tech Titans:" Amazon, Apple, eBay , Facebook and Google. Collectively, these five companies are worth more than a trillion dollars. Their
In this era of "do not call lists," anti-spamming legislation, mailing opt-outs and the many ways that consumers tune us marketers out, one might expect the 95 year-old "Direct Marketing Association" to be a quaint reminder of a bygone era, gradually fading into irrelevance. That's definitely not to be the case because they have evolved
The phrase “Content is King” may not be new, but it certainly has enduring relevance in our digital world where so much of our lives are experienced online and increasingly shared online. In fact, the very essence of social media is found in the ways we create content, share it,
We're working on a project with a retail industry thought leadership organization called Retail Systems Research (RSR for short). My colleague, Wilson Raj, is working with RSR Managing Partner Nikki Baird to explore how data-driven customer centricity holds the key to successful omni-channel retailing. Omni-channel retailing is a concept that applies
In case you've missed it, our friends from Down Under have written some great posts about customer intelligence on our sister blog, Left of the Date Line. Each one of our colleagues have a few posts, so here is a summary of my favorites, which I encourage you to read:
It should be no surprise that our marketing department here at SAS has a strong culture of measurement and accountability. As a result, it should shock nobody that we actually use our own customer intelligence solutions to help achieve our continuous improvement. My colleague, Matt Fulk, heads up the team that has been
17 days ago, I posted Olympic inspiration for marketers and in it I shared a few good lessons for marketers from the Games. With a long-term focus, discipline, results orientation and teamwork, all sorts of victories are possible - for both athletes and marketers. Those same lessons have been validated
A weekly ritual at our house is to pore over the local Sunday newspaper print edition and drink big mugs of strong coffee. My wife and I take different sections, we discuss various items that strike us along the way, and we can often have the world's problems solved by noon. It's very
The opening ceremonies for the 2012 summer Olympic Games in London, England are about to start and I could not be more thrilled. The Olympics are the pinnacle in the world of sports and the opening ceremonies are a phenomenal opportunity for people all over the world to burst with pride as
