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.
"Give the lady what she wants" and "The customer is always right" are quotes attributed to the venerable Chicago retailing pioneer Marshall Field. That customer-centered approach to doing business was leading-edge at the close of the 19th century and soon became a competitive advantage for Mr. Field's namesake department store empire.
Knowing what your customers want and when they want it is valuable insight for any business. The key is to know how to find out. At Oberweis Dairy, one of their important product lines is ice cream - and for them, higher temperatures mean more ice cream sales, right? Not
How many loyalty tags do you have on your keychain? Five? Six? Ten? Would you say those tags make you more loyal, or do you just have them for the discounts? And if it's just for the discounts, does that really build your loyalty or would you switch to the
I started this blog over 4 years ago as a way to give our customers a dynamic source of useful information, and also to help connect the dots for them between the business problems they face and the value propositions of our Customer Intelligence solutions. Along the way, I think I've become
At the online “flash sale” retailer Gilt, success comes from breaking through the clutter, and from ensuring that their offers matter in the grand scheme of their customers' lives. And with more than 8 million "members" (potential customers), they've managed to create a culture where customers are the company’s biggest advocates and evangelists. So how
Having just gotten three emails in the last month that begin with "Dear Andrea," I can't tell you enough how important the topic of data hygiene is for marketers. I can assure you that addressing a person named John Balla as "Andrea" is the fastest way to get John Balla to disregard your message and
As mentioned in a previous post about how we try not to annoy our customers, we really make sure we're not just going through the motions in complying with anti-SPAM laws. And it all has to do with how we regard customer relationships - they're valuable and we want them to be based on mutual
In the last two weeks I've put some effort into opting-out of emails. I can't read them all because simply get too many, so something has to give. In some cases, I signed up for the newsletter or opted in to something with every intention of keeping up, but it just became too much.
Me: Hey! Orkut is going away. You: Oh, bummer! I didn't realize you had one of your cousins from Hungary in town. Me: *sigh* One of my Facebook friends recently mused in a post about getting a farewell email from Orkut. And she couldn’t remember what Orkut was. To me
I like to be reminded from time to time that having a positive attitude has so many better outcomes than the opposite approach. Some people try to make the case that focusing on positive outcomes actually drives positive outcomes, which sounds idealistic, but I think there's some truth to that idea.
