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.
Recent CMO Council research on getting in sync with mobile customers surfaced several key findings with enough significance that I wanted to explore each on in its own blog post. As was the case with objectives & context, and challenges & metrics, the idea of engagement and the customer experience
Mobile devices and applications - from smartphones and tablets to wearables and RFID are literally changing functions in the enterprise and transforming whole industries practically before our very eyes. It's a game-changer for how people live their lives and engage with brands, which makes it a game-changer for marketers as
Few advances in technology have impacted how we do business as broadly and profoundly as mobile. Mobile devices are changing how people behave and what they expect, and as a result it’s changing the way we need to engage with our customers. The way consumers become emotionally attached to their
Healthy skepticism is a part of human nature - it's probably an involuntary defense mechanism that has been refined as we've evolved as social beings. And in today's world of scripted "reality" TV shows, internet hoaxes and celebrity "farewell" tours, healthy skepticism can help you quickly steer clear of things that waste your
Retailing is fascinating because it’s the very essence of a market – a place that begins and ends with the customer. And the cash register / online shopping cart is where the supply curve and the demand curve meet, generating an endless stream of customer data made very valuable with
Kicking off the new year is a great time to assess what's worked and what hasn't, take inventory, check assumptions and do other things to prepare you for a fresh new year. It's also a perfect time to get a broader perspective on world events and what might happen in 2015 that
If you like hunting, fishing, hiking or camping, chances are you not only know Cabela's but you're also a customer. Cabela's is one of the most well-known outdoor recreation brands in the world and was founded as a direct retailer in 1961. Cabela's now engages with customers across all 50 U.S states
As my followers can attest, my normal viewpoint in this blog is as a marketer focused on marketers. And I try to stay true to the tagline of this blog: Evolving relationships for business growth. I chose those words very carefully so that evolving could with be interpreted either passively
There has been a lot of attention given in this blog and elsewhere to this idea of marketing becoming more "scientific." And for good reason - because it's actually happening. It's all about big data, digitization, the importance of search, the empowered (social) consumer, the Internet of Things, and how
Marketing has evolved - thankfully - from the days when everyone just thought of us as the brochures and tradeshows people. Nowadays, we're as likely to be focused on creating digital content that's worth sharing as we are putting a tradeshow sponsorship together, but all of it is data-driven. So what does
