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.
It seems like every retailer nowadays has a loyalty program. From the local coffee house to “big box” national retailers to almost any online merchant, everyone has a loyalty program. But do people really want them? It turns out the answer is yes – a resounding yes. But are those programs
Few advances in technology have impacted how we do business as broadly and profoundly as mobile devices. They are creating new opportunities for organizations to engage with their customers, but more importantly, mobile devices are changing how people behave. For that reason, we partnered with the CMO Council to study the
You can always tell when a person is enjoying himself – the bright eyes, the smiling face and the hand gestures are unmistakable. Jim Foreman from Staples is an executive that clearly enjoys talking about both marketing and analytics, which makes his presentations both informative and enjoyable. Recently, Jim shared
Earvin “Magic” Johnson is very large in stature and even larger in personality. He is often remembered as a professional basketball star and is now making his mark in the business world in a characteristically large-sized way. And Magic just loves to prove people wrong – especially if they tell him
Word-of-mouth references and first-person accounts are usually the best way to get the “real deal” on something. It’s how you can get unfiltered information that’s almost as good as having the experience first hand. With that idea in mind, I was more than pleased to hear George Blankenship share his
Theoretically, loyalty programs are supposed to motivate customers to be loyal. But does it always turn out that way? Evidence is mounting that points to the fact that loyalty programs condition customers to expect discounts, and they don’t always cultivate loyalty. And the danger with that discount-driven scenario is that:
Mobile technology and the advent of tablets and smartphones have transformed whole industries and are changing customer behavior in ways that impact marketers around the globe. More than just another channel, mobile is digital and social at the same time. It’s making the quest for marketers to stay in sync
People are funny. They’re often fickle, choosy, demanding and impatient. At times, they’ll say one thing and then do another. So when they become customers, how can you possibly predict what they’ll do? Well it turns out there are ways to do it quite effectively using data and analytics. One advocate of
There is no shortage of technology buzzwords today - digitization, big data, the internet of things, mobile, social, cloud computing, and so on. For marketers, all these buzzwords can be at once astonishing, thrilling, exasperating, potentially overwhelming, and sometimes even downright cliché. But together, they're all part of the ways that technology is rewriting
We live in the age of big data - just about everything is evolving and the pace of technological change is accelerating. More and more parts of our lives are being carried out online, and with the explosion of web-enabled devices, there is some truth to the idea that we're literally being surrounded by
