Industry Legend Diane Hessan: From Market Research Disruptor to Portfolio Leader

In this insightful interview, Leonard Murphy speaks with Diane Hessan, founder of Communispace (now C Space) and a pioneering figure in the market research industry. Hessan shares her journey from humble beginnings to becoming an industry innovator who transformed how companies engage with consumers through online communities.

The conversation covers Hessan's career progression from General Foods to founding Communispace in 2000, where she introduced the revolutionary concept of leveraging the internet for online consumer communities. Despite initial skepticism from traditional market researchers, her company grew to serve 400 clients with 700 employees across multiple countries.

Transcript

Leonard Murphy: Hello everybody. It's Lenny Murphy with another edition of our CEO series of interviews. And today I am joined by truly a legend in our industry. Hassen, Diane, welcome. How are you?

Diane Hessan: Hi, Len. I'm great. How are you?

Leonard Murphy: I'm all right. It is so you are a legend and…

Diane Hessan: Nice to be here. everybody.

Leonard Murphy: many things. if I tried to do it, it would take 10 minutes to fill all up. So I bet you have a more condensed version. So let's just jump in. Tell the audience who may not be familiar with you who you are, what you do, kind of your origin story and then we will go from there.

Diane Hessan: Okay. Sure. Hi everybody. Remind me if I don't say anything about this when I kind of give you a bit of an origin story, but it's a huge compliment for you to say that I'm a legend. So I'll come back to that and tell you why. It's probably not what you think. I grew up on the wrong side of the tracks, for which I am very grateful because now in my elite bubble that I live in, it is great to still, go back to my roots a lot because my passion in life is really about understanding people who are different from me. And in the beginning of my career when I got out of business school, I worked in marketing at General Foods. That was my first, job where I had a W2 form as opposed to a 1099. General Foods was a big food company. It was eventually sold to Craft. And I went in there, didn't really know what I wanted to do, and they said to me, Diane, what product do you want to work on? I mean, you can work. We have stove top stuffing, Pebble cereal, bird's eyee frozen peas, Gainsburg burgers, countrytime lemonade, and they had all these things.

Leonard Murphy: Okay. Right.  Okay.

Diane Hessan: And I was coming in and I just said, "Look, play me wherever you need me. I'm really flexible, but do me a favor. Just put me on a product that I understand." And they said, "What do you mean?" I said, " don't put me on decaffeinated coffee because I don't get it." why would anybody drink something that tastes bad if it doesn't deliver the primary benefit? And in their infinite wisdom, General Foods put me on brim decaffeinated coffee. And that was the beginning of my market research career. It was the beginning of my journey to say, who are these people and what can I learn about them that would help me figure out how to sell more stuff to them? I moved on. I was in a training development company for a while where I spent a big chunk of my early career. Training and development was a new arena. I got into that business. I left General Foods to move to Boston because of a guy. he wasn't necessarily the reason to move, but I loved working in this training and development company. And I had every job I was in sales and then I ran the sales organization. I was in marketing. I did strategic alliances.  I did global operations and just picked up a lot of skills there. And I left in 2000 to start my own company which ended up being Communispace which was the first company to really leverage the internet to create online communities. I don't know if you're the person I remember at the time somebody I thought it was you ended up calling them Mrocks Market Research Online Community,…

Leonard Murphy: It was not me.

Diane Hessan: Which was an absolutely horrible name.

Leonard Murphy: That was Is it Gartner or Forester? One of them. yes. And thank God it didn't stay that long.

Diane Hessan: One of those.

Leonard Murphy: That Yeah. Yep.

Diane Hessan: And Communispace was four years of hell and then a decade more of in the beginning, It was hard because we were a startup and didn't have a lot of cash. It was hard because I really was a stranger to the industry. And I think there are a lot of people out there now trying to get in and thinking that they can sell their stuff to our clients without really embracing what's currently there, the language, the associations, the people, everything else. And then ultimately we figured it out and we ended up working with a couple of initial clients that absolutely loved what we were doing and all of a sudden we had 400 clients and 700 employees and the company is in a zillion different countries and all of that. and then in the next phase of my career I've had more of a portfolio life serving on corporate boards in kind of investing in helping the next generation of startups in tech and I also parlayed my love of market research into the political arena where I've been in conversation with a panel of 500 voters since 2016. And in terms of the legend thing, I alluded to this a little bit, Len, but when I first came into the industry, we had an idea that was basically based on the fact that in the year 2000, if you are right now between the ages of maybe 32, 33 and 103, your first experience with community on the web was America Online.  And a lot of people who are watching this will remember we'd get floppy discs in the mail and we'd get on AOL and you'd be in chat rooms and you'd do instant messaging. And I just thought that was the coolest thing. And we were convinced that we could apply community to companies for serious business purposes. And although I had a lot of marketing jobs, I did not know the market research industry. I just knew that listening to consumers was an incredibly underrated marketing strategy. And so I started dabbling in the industry. But people started saying things to me like,…

Leonard Murphy: Right.

Diane Hessan: You should go to an ARF conference. And I would say what's ARF? and somebody would say to me, Would you ever use your technology instead of a tracker? And I'd say, what's a tracker? I didn't know that.  And I hired people who were from the industry to teach me. And just I hired tech people who would teach me to learn to code, I had a lot of people mentoring me and helping me really understand the industry, which I thought was critical to earn the right to be in it. And so when you say I'm a legend, it's such a compliment because I remember 20 years ago I'd be making a presentation at a conference like yours and people would stand up and go, you don't even get this business. this isn't research. I mean, you can't ask a question to somebody and then the following week go back to the same person, where this isn't statistically significant. I mean, we were breaking so many rules at the time, which of course have been broken a lot now.

Leonard Murphy: Yep. we first met gosh probably 2010 maybe.

Diane Hessan: And so, I love feeling like I'm a part of the traditional industry. Yeah. Yeah.

Leonard Murphy: Around then so I think you were just beginning to kind of prove Wait. Yeah.

Diane Hessan: 2010 was a good year.

Leonard Murphy: That was that the year that Stan got behind you and said, " all right, you're time to go global." I've heard that story that Stan,…

Diane Hessan: That story. No, that was much later.

Leonard Murphy: All right.

Diane Hessan: Yeah, that was maybe two years later or whatever. Yeah.

Leonard Murphy: The point was you were a disruptor.

Diane Hessan: And is Dan Stan who at the time was the head of insights at Coca-Cola and many of you who are listening probably know that him as the guy who eventually went to Unilever to run all of that globally.

Leonard Murphy: And just helped to drive innovation across the board and you were one of those examples and that's why I wanted to have this conversation with you right because that backstory of not coming from the industry seeing an opportunity to deploy technology in a new way to address different types of business issues. I think we're in that point now again primarily driven by kind of AI and…

Diane Hessan: Mhm.

Leonard Murphy: It opens up the door for all these new things that we hadn't thought about before and there's lots of new people entering the market and then trying to learn the language and who do we talk to and how does this work? So, and you are definitely an example of someone…

Diane Hessan: Mhm. Right.

Leonard Murphy: Who you did it. you took that ride and you, took the hits, but also, eventually reap the benefits. cuz nobody would think of community space or space as it's now not knowing that that's not just a traditional research company because you've been so embedded into the ecosystem for so long now but at the time you were having a hard time giving it away right when you first started.

Diane Hessan: My gosh, we were begging people and to the extent that there are people who are listening who are trying to do that kind of thing now.  I mean, I got to the point where I had a sales pitch that worked and not a pitch, but I didn't know a lot about tech even though I was running a tech company, but I had had a lot of sales experience. And I would get myself into the office of somebody important and I'd just say, "Look, my company's doing something that is really, really exciting. We're looking for people who want to go on a journey with us, who really want to have an adventure. And if they do that, we're going to give them all kinds of air cover. But I want to tell you a little bit about what we're doing. But it might not be for you. Sometimes people just don't have the stomach for this, and there were people who would say, "Whoa, whoa, this is like this sounds really, really great, and I'm not sure I can sell it, or whatever else." But there were other people who were saying, let's go. Let's go.

Leonard Murphy: Yep. That's very cool.

Diane Hessan: Let's give it a shot. And yeah,…

Leonard Murphy: So, through this career, you've learned a lot, and I think we're already kind of in this place now of trying to condense us into the new generation. So what bestow your wisdom upon us Diane? What are some kind of the key lessons that you have learned along the way that…

Diane Hessan: I know. Yeah. Okay.

Leonard Murphy: if you're mentoring CEO of an early stage company or whatever would that be? What are some of those key lessons?

Diane Hessan: For people who are kind of doing early stage companies, I guess there are a few things I'd say. Number one, I think people fall in love with their tech.  They fall in love with the magic of their product. And sometimes, what's that? Yeah. And sometimes you forget that your client doesn't really know if they're just trying to accomplish something. And we can come back later to what I think people are trying to accomplish. But I think that if you are totally geeking out on your product, you've got to kind of sit back and say, "Whoa, whoa, what are we really trying to accomplish here?" I mean, I can give you a thousand examples here, but I literally remember, and this is when things were going really well and we were doubling in size every year.  It was the summer of I think 2008 and I just thought at the time we had maybe 50 clients. I mean we had a lot of early clients. They were all large Fortune 500 type companies. I used to say to people we have 400 clients and if you looked at all the logos you'd know every single one of them. And I decided to travel and see a bunch of clients over the summer.

Leonard Murphy: Wow.

Diane Hessan: And I went and saw 50 clients. I remember I went down south. I went to Hilton and with me a document somebody created for me a whole document. They had gone through the entire Hilton community and highlighted for me different things that were going on in there so that I could say to the client, look at this. This is so interesting. This whole group of people never leave their hotel room.  But the thing that amazed me was I had so much fun going into the communities with all None of these clients ever went into their community. So They have a URL. The thing is gorgeous. There are consumers in there all the time saying things to each other, answering surveys, posting pictures, doing whatever else. The clients were too busy. They didn't have time to actually use our technology and what we would do is we would summarize what was going on in the community to send it to clients but it was like a three-page ugly word document.  So I went back after that trip and I said to our CFO, "We need a printer, right? I mean, we need to create absolutely gorgeous documents." This is of course 15 years ago.  So that instead of having great stuff going on with our tech that clients aren't seeing and then something super unsexy that we're actually delivering to them, we need to make the assumption they have no idea what's going on in the community. And instead, let's give them something so that the CMO says, "What's that?" and they're walking down the hallway hugging their report on, back to school shopping, or whatever it is. So, we realized that although we were a tech company, we had to really transform what we were delivering to clients because that's what they valued. And, you always think the big questions we would get all the time. I used to think the big questions were going to be, "How do I know this is valid? How do I know this is representative?" because that's…

Leonard Murphy: Right. Sure.

Diane Hessan: What everybody in the industry was saying to me. The clients were saying things like, "If I do this, do I need to have a whole full-time person working on this community?" It was their biggest question. They didn't care what kind of technology platform we had. They didn't care how many lines of code I had, just any of the stuff. So, what tech people worried about was What market research industry people worried about was different.  But the clients were saying,"I don't know if I have enough staff to run this thing." so all of those things, it's just and so what happens is know that you'll probably pivot. that even if your technology is the know that your first idea will probably end up not what you offer and be ready for that. So you got to love what you're doing because you're doing it 24/7 and…

Leonard Murphy: Yeah. That is wonderful advice.

Diane Hessan: Yet at the same time you have to say what will this become and what is this if I'm walking in the client shoes how is the experience of what I'm offering completely different from the way that I'm seeing it and I think going through that and having clients who will coach you through that makes a really big difference. Yes. Yeah.

Leonard Murphy: I see it all the time that we're doing this cool tech okay what's the business issue that you're solving right because ultimately that is what the client is they have different set of priorities totally agree that folks need to do

Diane Hessan: Look, and then everybody says listen to your clients, but I think it's more like have your clients coach ask them questions "I know you really like this. how do you describe this online community in your organization? I do something totally I don't call it what you guys call it because you guys are too fancy for me. Here's what I say focus group on steroids. I'm like, focus group on steroids? That's amazing. I love that. and we started I remember that and I got that from Tom Braillesford at Hallmark. Then we had another client at Craft

Leonard Murphy: Tom is a good guy.

Diane Hessan: A great guy. Yeah, he was our first client.

Leonard Murphy: Okay.

Diane Hessan: So, I always call him our founder. And then we had a client at Craft named Gretchen Wley. And Craft loved what we were doing. And one day she calls me on the phone and she says, "Okay, I have to tell you why your product is going to work." I said, "Okay." She says, "I was just in a focus group session and there we all are. We're behind the one-way mirror.  We're watching all of these people. We're eating our M&M's. And one of my colleagues is leaning on the light switch, like this. And his arm went like that. And our lights went on. And all the people in the focus group turned around to look at us. And we hit the floor. She said, "Duh." And she said that is the state of the industry in 2004 or whatever the time was. She said we are so detached from our respondents that not only are we not having direct conversations with them but when they know we are there we are hiding from them. And that's the transformation that you can take people through.  So, I mean, I'm telling you, as I said before, I can give you a hundred stories like that, but those are gold. Yeah.

Leonard Murphy: Yeah, that's fantastic. So, as we kind of glide into the landing pad here, you have a much broader perspective now, right? You said you have a portfolio. You're involved lots of different types of companies doing different things. as well as tapped into the political thing which by the way do you remember it's the last time we saw each other was at in 2016 when you and I sat up on stage to talk about the results of the 2016 election and…

Diane Hessan: I do remember that. Yeah. What?

Leonard Murphy: Folks were terrified of what you're talking about politics and it's no we were talking about politics we're talking about understanding people so I cherish that memory by the way

Diane Hessan: Yeah. And I'm so boring. I am still talking to 500 voters every Tuesday trying to see what's going on with them and…

Leonard Murphy: I have followed along.

Diane Hessan: Their lives and how they're thinking about the world. It's just totally fascinating.

Leonard Murphy: Very cool. just so you imparted wisdom. Now we think about this period of change that we are in at all levels. what's your take? Where do you think if you're trying to suggest here's what you should focus on over the course of the next two years during all of these different technological disruption, business disruption, political disruption, etc. What does that look like for you?

Diane Hessan: You mean what does what do I think's going to happen or

Leonard Murphy: What you certainly interested in that but probably more along the lines of what's important to focus on during periods of change with your take on specifically in this period of change. Here's what you're focusing on.

Diane Hessan: So in terms of the research space I think because especially with AI and just everything that's happening I think we have to balance look quality is table stakes you have s* respondents right you have a methodology that doesn't work it's not going to work but assuming that you have quality there are three things we got to balance speed of sights depth of insights and relevance  to the business, So, the speed is breathtaking these days and we're able to find things out really fast and relatively inexpensive. It's inexpensively. It's just staggering even compared to a year ago. Depth is that sometimes we get fast information that doesn't tell us much more than we already know. So with consumer behaviors shifting all the time being able c think about your client saying tell me something I don't know tell me something I don't know they don't want just obvious stuff fast so depth of insight matters a lot and I think it's hard work to do that because it requires understanding the client's business and then of course the third one is that what we are learning and  what we are communicating, what clients are seeing has to be connected to the priorities of our organizations. And getting all three of these to me is the holy grail. And you know that you're doing well when the client is asking you to work on their very biggest issues. I mean, client says, "Do I want a red package or a blue package?" that's nice. You can tell them now in 15 minutes based on, 10,000 people, go with the red. But that's not as a leader. What nourishes you are having an opportunity to work on things that are really transformative for businesses that really change the game. And sometimes it's geeky researchy things. I mean, sometimes it's just I know you've been focused on demographics forever, like women versus men this versus that, but you should think about the world differently and boards are interested in that and everything. But I think sometimes we get, …

Leonard Murphy: Yep.

Diane Hessan: You got to have all three. How do you do that? Because fast alone is a year from now, everybody will be fast, we were really fast. We could get people within 24 hours answers to questions and people thought that was miraculous. Now it would be boring. No one would even say nobody even says anymore how long is it going to take you to get that information. They assume it's fast. But is it interesting? Do you get and why behind what's happening? And is it something that even matters to the business? Or are you working with a client that doesn't know their business that well? And so we're all sitting here, in this rabbit hole talking about stuff that nobody really cares about. So I think balancing all that matters. And the way that you do that is related to your team, and your people, which I didn't talk a lot about, but it is ultimately all about your team. And although you can have technical people who are really geeky, you got to have people who kind of help you get out of that and say, what are we really doing for this client that is going to make a significant difference? Where's the use case in here where ultimately we can have a client say, what, I really wanted to work with those people because here's the story of how they changed everything.

Leonard Murphy: Yeah, very cool.

Diane Hessan: We too.

Leonard Murphy: Diane, let's not go damn near 10 years without talking again. this was fantastic. congratulations on all your success and I will look forward to talking to you again soon. And really, thank you for sharing your experience and wisdom with our audience. guys, this really was a privilege. so I hope that you got a lot out of this. I certainly did.

Diane Hessan: Thank you.

Leonard Murphy: All right, Diane, take care. have a great weekend since we're talking on a Friday and we'll chat again soon. Thank you. All right,…

Diane Hessan: Tada. Yeah,…

Leonard Murphy: we did it. I'm sorry. I wish we had more time. There's so much more I wanted to dig into, but I've got to huff on a client call. But no,…

Diane Hessan: No problem. I'm really, really sorry I showed up late. That was my fault. Thank you,…

Leonard Murphy: No worries. But good to catch up. Seriously, let's not let it be, years and years. Always appreciate your perspective and your time.

Diane Hessan: Bye.

Leonard Murphy: All right, have a great weekend. Thanks.