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.
There is a confluence of events happening this month that give us a great opportunity to spotlight one of the most complex and fascinating markets you can find anywhere: healthcare and life sciences (HLS for short). HLS includes all the industries that relate to caring for the health of individuals,
I am at the Forrester's Marketing Forum in San Francisco and today’s keynote presentations included two of Forrester’s Principal Analysts, Chris Stutzman and Emily Riley. Their presentation was provocatively titled, How to Succeed in a Decade of Digital Disruption: ADAPT to the CORE, which tied to the show’s theme, “Innovating
It should come as no surprise that one of the topics of great interest to the customer intelligence community is marketing measurement. And like anything, the better the measurement, the better the potential impact for management. So, to address the topic of marketing measurement for our recent Webinar with the
I recently had the privilege to work with Charlene Li, one of our industry's thought leaders, on a Webinar that SAS sponsored and the American Marketing Association produced, titled "Drive Marketing Relevance in Today's Digital World." The SAS host and architect of the discussion's content was Jonathan Hornby, one of
There is nothing quite like third-party validation to complete the picture when telling a story. A quick peek at our Customer Success Stories page and any number of Analyst Reports tell versions of the SAS story as a great source of business solutions in ways that we could never do
Retail is an interesting industry. It has its own challenges and opportunities, but what happens in retail is worth watching for marketers in any industry because retailing is the essence of a market. The storefront / cash register / online shopping cart is literally the intersection of the “supply” curve
I am one of those people that frequently walks around with a soundtrack playing inside my head, and during the holidays it usually involves Bing Crosby or Nat King Cole crooning about snow or jingle bells. It might involve grandmas getting run over by reindeer, or the female sensation du
I recently had the pleasure to attend the keynote panel for NCDM, which began with introductory statements by Larry Kimmel, CEO of the Direct Marketing Association. One of his statements really set the tone for the panel and actually for the rest of the show: “Data, customer centricity and accountability
Every night, I drive right by our favorite grocery store on my way home from work, so I usually call home to see if we need anything. Sometimes the list gets long and I have to pull over to write it all down. That’s how I manage our grocery list.
Deb Orton recently had a chance to speak with Bruce Bedford, VP of Marketing Analytics and Consumer Insights at Oberweis Dairy about social media and its role in how they do business. Oberweis Dairy is based in the Midwest and reaches its customers through 48 store locations, its home-delivery business
