Diane H. Schmalensee, Founder


Diane Schmalensee, President of Schmalensee Partners, has over 25 years experience in helping clients achieve exceptional and demonstrable customer-focused performance.  She specializes in listening to internal and external customers and using measurement and management skills to guide marketing, research, operations and corporate strategies.  Clients seek her out when they face challenging stakeholder, customer, measurement or strategy-related situations that require experience, agility, credibility or connections.

Before founding Schmalensee Partners in 1991, she worked as Vice President of the Marketing Science Institute, as Vice President of Opinion Research Corporation, and in research for major regional advertising agencies.  She holds an MBA from San Diego State University and a Bachelor's degree from Wellesley College.

Ms. Schmalensee speaks and publishes on research, customer satisfaction and strategic planning topics for associations, such as The Conference Board, the American Marketing Association, and the American Society for Quality, as well as for corporations.  Her publications include: Building Customer Loyalty, Corporate Reputation, and Shareholder Value through Service Quality Improvement, "Internal Customer Satisfaction" in Managing Service Quality, “Finding the ‘Perfect’ Scale" in Marketing Research, “Lessons Learned on our Quality Journey” in The Center for Quality Management Journal, “Unleashing the Power of Connecting Disciplines” in Reflections, “Rules of Thumb for B2B Research”, “Measuring Returns on Research”, and “How to Make Research More Actionable” in Marketing Research. This last article won the Dave Hardin prize for the best article of the year from the American Marketing Association.  ... more