In 2007, a new John Hancock web tool began turning a few facts about an investor into a proposed investment plan. Within its first several weeks, it had generated 2,400 proposals. Two-thirds came from financial advisers. Seventy percent were built for people still saving; the rest were for people drawing income. The tool had a plain name, Proposal-Builder, and a revealing premise: in a complicated category, the useful thing can also be the message.
Carey Foran Hoch was then senior vice president and head of marketing at John Hancock Funds. She explained that the technology made it easier for advisers to offer the firm's life-cycle funds. The observation sounds almost obvious now. It was more interesting than a campaign line. It treated marketing as a piece of operating infrastructure, something that could shorten the distance between an adviser, a client and a decision.
That instinct has followed Hoch across a career of dense products and sprawling organizations. She worked in annuities before websites became an ordinary part of financial distribution. She moved through college savings, mutual funds, asset management and consulting. Since 2018, she has worked at Mercer, where she is now identified publicly as chief marketing officer and partner. Her territory has widened. The central problem has stayed familiar: how do you turn institutional expertise into language, tools and experiences that another person can actually use?
Learning the machinery
Hoch studied history at the College of Wooster, then earned an MBA from Simmons Graduate School of Management. The pairing makes sense in retrospect. History asks a person to hold systems, motives and consequences in view. Business school supplies a more immediate vocabulary for action. A financial marketer needs both. The product has mechanics; the client has a story; the institution has a past that shapes what it can credibly promise.
Her recorded professional path begins in 1995 at Keyport Life Insurance Company, where she served as a director of product management. She also worked at Fidelity and Guaranty Life Insurance and later became a vice president of product management for variable annuities at Putnam Investments. These were roles near the machinery. Fixed-income products and annuities are not props for a clever commercial. Their details matter, and mistakes compound. Before someone can simplify the proposition, they have to understand it.
In 2001, Hoch joined Manulife Financial. That year she led the launch of its 529 college-savings program. In 2002, she spearheaded a move into interactive marketing that included developing a website for the firm's managed-account program. The dates matter. This was a period when a financial-services website was shifting from electronic brochure to working interface. Hoch's remit was already moving across product, marketing and distribution.
The adviser is a person, too
At John Hancock, Hoch's work often sat between an institution and the advisers expected to explain it. In 2010, the company launched Hard Wired, a behavioral-finance program designed to help advisers understand how human biases affect investment behavior. Hoch called it “solution-driven” and emphasized application: advisers could connect the concepts to clients and portfolios. Education was not separate from distribution. It gave the intermediary a better way to work.
Turn the explanation into an instrument.
In complex markets, a calculator, proposal builder or decision framework can do three jobs at once: teach the audience, make the product legible and create a reason to return.
College savings sharpened the human edge of that assignment. By 2011, Hoch was senior vice president and general manager of college savings at John Hancock Funds. Speaking about why families struggled to use 529 plans, she pointed to the economy and the market, then widened the frame. “We want to help make the 529 plan a multigenerational opportunity,” she said. Parents, grandparents, aunts, uncles and children all had a part in the effort. Advisers, in turn, needed relationships with all of them.
“We want to help make the 529 plan a multigenerational opportunity.”Carey Foran Hoch, 2011
It is a compact example of her recurring move: start with a technical container, then redraw it around the people making the decision. A 529 plan is a tax-advantaged account. It is also a family coordination problem unfolding over years. Good marketing cannot change the rules of the account, but it can show the audience who belongs in the conversation.
Building connective tissue
Hoch's public record also includes a different kind of infrastructure. In 2008 she founded the John Hancock Women's Networking Group in Boston. By the time she left in 2012, chapters served businesses across the company. An internal network looks simple only from a distance. To survive beyond its first gathering, it needs useful programming, repeat participation and a structure that other people can carry.
The same outward-facing impulse appears in her organization work. Her LinkedIn profile lists long involvement with the Mutual Fund Education Alliance, including board and council leadership. She has served as a co-chair of the Lincoln School Foundation, helping oversee efforts to bring innovative curriculum into a school. Earlier, she held executive-team and strategy roles with Families First and served on the College Savings Plans Network board.
These roles do not prove a grand theory. They do show repetition. Hoch keeps appearing where information, institutions and groups of people need a structure for meeting one another. A marketing department can perform that role inside a business. A network, trade association or foundation can perform it across a community. In each case, the artifact that matters is not simply a message. It is a connection that continues working after the meeting ends.
A wider canvas
Hoch left John Hancock for Fidelity Investments in late 2012. She later became managing director and chief marketing officer at F-Squared Investments, where her responsibilities spanned marketing strategy, communications, web, email, public relations, media and advertising across six business channels. She also held a senior marketing consulting role at Eaton Vance and worked with The Partnership, Inc. The job was getting broader, but it remained grounded in the same discipline of integrated explanation.
Joining Mercer in 2018 changed the scale again. Mercer sells expertise across workforce, retirement and investment questions. There is no single object to put on a shelf. The offer may be analysis, advice, implementation or an ongoing relationship. Marketing such a firm requires connecting subject-matter specialists, research, digital channels and client needs without sanding away the useful detail.
Her move to Mercer also completed a subtle transition from marketing financial products to marketing decisions about people and capital across an organization. It is a bigger map. Yet Hoch had already spent years learning to work through intermediaries, across channels and amid changing markets. The old lessons travel: know the mechanics, build something useful and give the audience a role in the story.
“I'm hoping that in the next five to 10 years, I'll continue to leverage my talent and help different people.”Carey Foran Hoch, 2008
That quote came from a 2008 industry profile, when Hoch was 13 years into her career and leading marketing at John Hancock Funds. Read now, it has the texture of a promise made without a fixed job title attached. The following years brought Fidelity, an asset-manager CMO seat, consulting work and Mercer. “Different people” turned out to include investors, advisers, colleagues and corporate decision-makers.
The long career
In 2023, Women We Admire included Hoch among its Top 50 Women Leaders of Boston. In 2026, Financial Promoter USA shortlisted her for Investment Marketer of the Year and Retirement Marketer of the Year. Recognition provides neat punctuation. Careers are made in the less photogenic spaces between those moments: learning the product, aligning the channels, getting a tool launched, keeping a network alive and adjusting the message when the market turns.
Hoch's career is especially legible as a record of changing media. She began when product knowledge and printed material carried much of the load. She pushed into interactive marketing at the start of the web's practical era. The modern Mercer environment includes data, connected platforms and artificial intelligence. Each wave invites a marketer to mistake novelty for strategy. Her record points to a steadier test: does the new channel help another person understand, decide or act?
The Proposal-Builder from 2007 is long gone from the live web. Its lesson survives. Thousands of people used it because it did more than announce a product. It helped them make one. In a business full of abstractions, that is a pleasingly concrete legacy, and a useful way to read the work Carey Hoch has kept choosing.