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.
Once again Mother’s Day has arrived and we all should take a moment to honor our moms. To that end, I’d like to reprise a post from two years ago, Happy Mother’s Day: advice for marketers from moms, and add some more motherly advice to guide us in marketing. Many thanks to
Think back to the best restaurant experience you’ve ever had - what made it memorable? Location, quality and ambience all matter, but for me, the truly great experiences have always been where the service was exceptional. In a small handful of cases, it was as if the servers anticipated my
Today is Earth Day – an annual event that began in 1970, which is considered by many to be the spark of the modern environmental movement. Recycling, environmental impact consideration, resource conservation and similar concepts are all rooted in the idea that as humanity grows and evolves, our impact on
The CMO Council’s Liz Miller thinks mobile is such a huge issue that we absolutely need to talk about it – and I couldn’t agree more. One of the reasons is that there seems to be a slight disconnect between how quickly our customers are advancing in their mobile lifestyles
You may not have known it, but April 9 is Internet of Things Day – a day touted by its organizers as a worldwide event bringing together makers, entrepreneurs, industry leaders and citizens to discuss, design and develop the emerging Internet of Things (IoT). While it doesn’t have quite the
Personalization - it's all the rage! And it's no wonder because people are coming to expect a personalized experience both online and offline, driven in part by the mobile experience. Analytically-driven marketing software makes personalization possible and examples abound of organizations that are doing quite well at it. But here's the catch
When was the last time you looked at your own company’s website? I mean, REALLY looked at it? And by that I mean, looked at it from the eyes of someone that knows nothing about your company. Try to do that every so often – it will give you an
In today’s world, leading your organization to faster, better decisions calls for skill, agility and resourcefulness. Increasingly, it also requires the use of analytics to meet changes in customer expectations brought about with social, mobile and the digitization of life. The lunch keynote at the DMA's Marketing Analytics Conference featured insights
Financial goals are best reached with long-term planning - be it savings plans, carefully arranged financing, or any and all forms of insurance coverage. When it's part of a plan and all goes well, the results intended are the ones achieved. All very good, right? But even the best laid plans at
Today's customers want consistent interactions and experiences with your organization, and increasingly they expect personalization and real-time relevance. A major catalyst behind those customer dynamics is mobile devices. The sheer size of the mobile market is enough to take notice, but an increasingly important factor is the proportion of smartphones & tablets and the
