The strange thing about life insurance is how much it asks a person to imagine and how little it traditionally asks them to do. Buy the policy. Put the papers somewhere safe. Pay the premium. Then return to ordinary life. For the company, that creates a peculiar marketing problem: the product can matter enormously while the relationship remains nearly invisible. Lindsay Hanson has spent the central stretch of her career working on that blank space.
Hanson joined John Hancock in 2006, the same year she graduated from Northeastern University with a degree that paired business finance with entrepreneurship. The combination now looks almost too neat. Finance taught the logic of the product. Entrepreneurship supplied the instinct to keep asking whether the category had to work the way it always had. She stayed, moving through roles as the Boston institution began making a basic change in posture: from protecting a distant outcome to creating reasons for customers to engage in the present.
Today she is John Hancock's chief marketing officer and head of Health & Wellness Solutions, as well as Manulife's global head of behavioral insurance. The long titles point to the breadth of the job. Her remit joins storytelling to sales, customer experience to program economics, and partnership announcements to the less glamorous work of making those partnerships operate. She is not simply describing a new brand. She is helping build the machinery that makes the description true.
01 / The missing middle
A policy in the drawer is a brand out of mind
Most marketers can point to a funnel. Hanson inherited something closer to a canyon. A person thinks carefully about coverage, crosses the purchase line and may then hear from the insurer only once or twice a year. The distance between those contacts is not neutral. It teaches the customer that the company is paperwork, not a participant. It also leaves little room for the company to learn what people value after the sale.
The alternative was a relationship built from smaller moments. John Hancock's Vitality program, launched in 2015, offered an organizing idea: customers could engage regularly, set goals and receive rewards. By 2016, Hanson was leading the program's strategy and operations. The marketing challenge moved inside the experience. A notification, a prompt and a modest reward all became expressions of the brand. Useful repetition could do what a large campaign alone could not.
In interviews, Hanson has said the company now reaches customers 20 to 30 times a month through these kinds of touchpoints. The number is striking because it reverses the category's natural cadence. But frequency without value is merely noise. Her work depends on a tougher bargain: each additional contact has to give the customer a reason not to tune out.
“Data is gold to us as an organization.”Lindsay Hanson
That sentence can sound like ordinary executive enthusiasm until you see what she asks data to do. It is not there only to report activity or decorate the quarterly review. It is there to puncture a belief the organization finds comfortable.
02 / Myth, meet customer
The most useful data changes somebody's mind
One internal assumption said older policyholders would be reluctant to use a digital program. It had the soft plausibility that makes a myth dangerous. Hanson's team split engagement into age cohorts and looked. Customers in their seventies turned out to be among the most active, with some returning to the app several times a day.
Older customers will avoid the app.
Customers in their seventies ranked among the most engaged.
Another assumption held that affluent customers would not care about small rewards. Again, actual behavior was less tidy. People enjoyed the rewards, and some passed them to family and friends. The object was small; the signal was not. A reward said the relationship could return something now. For a category built around a future promise, that present-tense gesture carried unusual weight.
Hanson's instinct here is part marketer and part operator. The marketer notices that a tiny benefit can hold emotional meaning. The operator asks whether the program economics work, whether engagement lasts and whether a team can deliver the experience consistently. Her current biography describes her as someone who blends bold ideas with practical execution. That phrasing fits because the boldness is rarely theatrical. It appears in the decision to keep measuring after the launch.
The lesson is portable. Every mature company accumulates customer stories it no longer checks. The highest-value research question may not be “What do people want?” It may be “Which thing are we certain they do not want?” Certainty is often where the test should begin.
03 / The commitment year
In 2018, the experiment became the operating model
Hanson points to 2018 as a hinge. Consumer research around the Vitality proposition found that nine in ten respondents wanted it, while seven in ten said it made them more motivated to buy life insurance. Her phrase for the moment was wonderfully uncorporate: “the light bulb went off.” John Hancock decided it would no longer sell a life insurance policy in the United States without a version of Vitality attached.
That choice matters because companies often hold a promising idea at arm's length. It lives as an option, an innovation lab or a campaign. The 2018 decision moved the idea into the standard product relationship. The company was no longer asking whether recurring engagement belonged at the edge of insurance. It was betting that the edge should become the center.
The career progression is not a sequence of unrelated promotions. It traces the expansion of one idea. First Hanson worked on the program. Then she led the strategy across markets. Finally, as CMO, she gained responsibility for making that orientation legible across the John Hancock brand. The apprentice learned the system from inside before being asked to narrate its future.
04 / Partnership without theater
Shared values have to survive the handoff
Hanson returns often to partnerships, but her standard for them is more exacting than mutual benefit. The companies must be trying to accomplish the same thing for the end customer. “That's really where the magic happens,” she has said. Remove the pleasant phrase and an operating rule remains: alignment has to extend past the press release.
Partnership work is translation work. One organization brings technology, another brings customers, and each arrives with its own vocabulary, incentives and approval paths. Someone has to keep the customer's experience coherent across those seams. Hanson leads teams that do exactly that, building collaborations while staying accountable for growth and experience.
- Begin with the outcome the customer should actually feel.
- Choose partners whose aims hold up after the announcement.
- Make the experience simple across company boundaries.
- Watch what customers do, then revise the next version.
This explains why Hanson's public language moves easily between story and system. She talks about purpose, then about economics. She talks about customer moments, then about data. In her world, the campaign is not an ornamental layer applied to the business. Marketing helps decide what the business does repeatedly.
05 / Staying long enough
Institutional memory can be a tool for change
The usual transformation story introduces an outsider who arrives with fresh eyes. Hanson offers a different model. She has worked at John Hancock for her entire publicly documented post-college career. By 2026, that is a 20-year apprenticeship inside one institution. She knows the old category language because she used it. She knows how earlier decisions were made, which seams can bear pressure and which relationships make execution possible.
Context can harden into habit, of course. Hanson's career suggests the more productive use: context as leverage. She could connect a 2015 program launch to a 2018 product decision, a 2021 global strategy role and a 2023 CMO mandate because she had watched the evidence accumulate. Longevity at a company became valuable because she kept converting memory into the next operating move.
Her life outside the office has its own regional continuity. She lives on Massachusetts' South Shore with her son Jack and dog Milo. She runs, practices yoga and skis in the White Mountains. Her board work includes the Greater Boston Chamber of Commerce and FedPoint, and she belongs to The Wall Street Journal's CMO Network. Even the geography of her story stays close to Boston: Northeastern, John Hancock, community boards, South Shore home, New Hampshire weekends.
There is a useful tension in that picture. Hanson is an institutional loyalist who is paid to make an old institution behave less predictably. The bridge is curiosity. Her teams listen, test and build. They let a surprising cohort overturn a neat assumption. They let a customer's response to a small reward reshape how the company thinks about value.
“Making sure that it's not only mutually beneficial, but you're trying to do the same things for the end customer.”Lindsay Hanson on partnerships
Her awards, including a 2021 Women in Insurance Leadership recognition, a 2023 Boston Top CMO honor and a 2026 BostonCMO ORBIE finalist spot, acknowledge the visible leadership. The more revealing achievement is structural. A product once designed to sit quietly can now generate a continuing conversation. A marketing department can learn from behavior instead of only broadcasting claims. A 160-year-old name can earn relevance in increments.
That is the part worth stealing. Do not begin with the reinvention speech. Find the quiet interval where the customer disappears. Put something useful there. Measure the response closely enough to be surprised. Then do it again. Hanson has made a career from that rhythm, and the rhythm is now part of the brand.