On Retail 3 of The Westchester in White Plains, Yamatai, a student Taiko percussion ensemble at Cornell University, announced – make that thundered – the opening of the new Uniqlo store there on Friday, March 21. Holding a breakfast meeting at the eBar at Nordstrom on the mall’s Retail 1, Stacey Cohen, CEO of Co-Communications, also in White Plains, did not miss a beat.
Remaining smiling and unruffled, she merely leaned into the conversation, remembering that her father was a drummer before ultimately going on to own several women’s fashion companies. Cohen comes from a musical family. (A cousin is the Broadway star Idina Menzel.) The family’s musical gifts passed her by, Cohen said. But what didn’t elude her was an ability to empathize with others immediately and connect them to the wider world.
“ ‘Co’ in Latin means ‘with,’” Cohen said of her marketing and public relations firm’s name. She and her team of 14 work with such clients as Burke Rehabilitation, Fordham and Manhattanville universities, Metro Hartford Alliance and the New Canaan Board of Realtors, not just for them. It’s a collegial approach that Cohen applied to, and discussed in, her first book, “Brand Up: The Ultimate Playbook for College & Career Success in the Digital World” (Post Hill Press, 2023) – an Amazon Top 100 best seller that she wrote with digital educators Jason Shaffer and Alan Katzman “to help teens to succeed in college admissions or if they’re going into business.”
Now she aims to do for 20 to 35 year olds what she did for their younger siblings with “Brand Up 2.0: Propel Your Early Career Success” (Post Hill Press, $19.99, 245 pages), written with TV producer Allison Kluger and lifestyle influencer and marketing consultant Kudzi Chikumbu.
Branding, Cohen said, has gotten a bad, hubristic rap: “It’s not a Kardashian thing. It’s the value of you.”
We all, she added, have to be able to answer the question why, among the millions of people, should employers choose you?
“I want to make (young people) get to the top of (a company’s) decision list,” she said of a challenging goal in a financially volatile moment and what is a tight job market, albeit one in which there aren’t enough workers. Indeed, many of the job seekers/holders Cohen has encountered are disheartened, often lacking the self-awareness and maybe even the sense of self-worth — vastly different from self-centeredness – to find the work that will reflect their intrinsic value. It’s why the first of the three “D” pillars in her new book is “Discovery.’
“You have to know you before you can own you,” she said. “First do self-reflection.”
And then you can begin to build the résumé and networking that will enable you to target the career you want to pursue.
“Here’s the thing about AI: Humans don’t read résumés,” she said. Instead, robots look for keywords, which is not the way for you to stand out in a field.
For all the technological advances, the job market is still a case of whom you know as much as, if not more so than, what you know, Cohen said. It’s not “spray and pray,” she added, referring to the cast-a-wide-net approach to marketing yourself.
“I’d rather see someone send out 10 (targeted) résumés than 100.”
That brings us to the second and third “D” pillars of “Brand Up 2.0” – “Developing Your Assets” and the “Delivery” of them. Clean up your social media. Learn proper email etiquette. Create a LinkedIn page that illustrates what you have to offer, and use LinkedIn to find those who may have something to offer you. If you want a sales manager’s position at Nordstrom, go to LinkedIn to search for connections in the sales management and retail fields.
It’s the kind of advice that Cohen has dispensed everywhere from ABC’s “Good Morning America” (a January appearance to promote the first book); to the Bronx, where she has spoken to underserved students;to Zoom, where she addressed Ukrainian refugees in Poland. Cohen, who grew up in Brooklyn and New City, was premed at Syracuse University before earning a Bachelor of Science degree in counseling. A senior-year stint working in the emotional intense environment of a nursing home — she was interested in gerontology — proved not to be for her and neither did a human resources position at a big advertising agency.
Her far more felicitous tenure in marketing at CBS Fox Video led to an MBA from Fordham University and freelancing as she raised her family. It was while she was writing a biotech report with no access to the company’s CEO for further information that she had an epiphany.
“I realized I wanted to work directly with clients,” said Cohen, who had been bitten by the entrepreneurial bug at age 14, when she began a waitress-for-hire business. “The kind of agency I wanted to run was very different.”
She started Co-Communications in a spare bedroom of her home in 1998. Now she wants to help others zero in on their dreams.
“This is my passion – to give back and uplift the next generation.”
