Getting to Known You: Susan Hoxie, SVP, Strategy
Known’s new B2C strategy lead is enamored by data and an online course connoisseur with a mile-long reading list.
Susan Hoxie joined Known in January after spending over a decade at brand consultancy Hall & Partners. Prior to that, she held a number of marketing research roles at tech companies like Microsoft, Attachmate and others. Her job functions in our Strategy practice include account strategy and relationship mapping as well as innovation. Susan will be defining the long-term vision for Known’s B2C research through improved positioning, differentiation, and product.
I recently caught up with Susan to learn about her career path, what she likes about working at Known, and what she’s reading.
Why she joined Known
One of the things that drew Susan to the agency was that it had everything — creative, strategy and science — under one umbrella. She says that when she worked within large holding companies, there inevitably was a knowledge gap. One part of the business would be measuring the effectiveness of a campaign but would have no idea who the campaign was targeting. How can a message’s effectiveness be measured when the people measuring a message are unclear of the creative concept or the message positioning?
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The holistic approach at Known fills in those gaps, as research and media targeting can work together with creative to tell a whole story, simplifying things for clients because they can take action faster. “It’s just an integrated part of the research and insights that we do,” says Susan. She adds this approach helps clients “because the reality is our clients are going to have to do the work of stitching all that together on their own” if we don’t do it for them.
What really struck Susan when she joined the agency was “the infectious enthusiasm for our strategy and our vision — It really comes through. It was like, ‘Wow! Everyone is so enthusiastic, so positive,” she says. “It is 100% universal, everybody I talked to has said how much Known really cares about its people, and that the people come first.”
Her career journey
“The journeys people take to end up in market research are fascinating because everybody lands in this space from a different direction,” Susan says. “It’s because it’s so multidisciplinary, and it’s numbers, and data, and it’s also art and storytelling. It’s a cool intersection of everything.”
Susan’s own journey to market research included a number of twists and turns. She was working toward a Ph.D. when she realized she didn’t want to pursue a life in academia. “I thought I was going to be a professor of economics or political science, but that did not happen,” she says. “I ended up getting a master’s degree in information science at University of Washington, and I went to work at Attachmate, which at the time was the second largest tech company in Washington state.”
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At the company, Susan wore a variety of research hats, from customer satisfaction work and analyst relations to acquisition research. When she joined Microsoft’s research and insights business, she made the move to primary market research, which excited her because it was a whole new discipline. “It was a really exciting place to work if you’re a nerd like me,” she says. “I worked in the infrastructure/server and tools business and it was during the dawn of the cloud, before the cloud existed.”
Off the clock, on the page
Every Knowner gets asked “What are you Known for?” The answers always give insight into the employee’s whole self. Susan is Known for “getting lost in a good book.” She belongs to two book groups and avidly reads both fiction and nonfiction. “When my kids were younger I would be reading and they would have to say ‘Mom! Mom!’ several times until I answered them.”
“I love books about how the mind works,” she says. “I recently read a book called Remember — The Science of Memory and the Art of Forgetting by Lisa Genova about how we form memory, and I think it’s really appropriate for thinking about campaign work, brand engagement and brand relationships.”
When she’s not engrossed in a book, she can be found taking any online course she can find, especially ones about neuroscience. “I just took a class on the network dynamics of social interaction,” she says. “It was really interesting, about how beliefs spread throughout a community and how the network dynamic influences that. Any of those freebie online classes I can take, I’ll take.”
Looks like Susan Hoxie is already living one of Known’s core values: “Never stop learning.”
Want to know more B2C Strategy at Known? Reach out.
