ALLISON IN THE NEWS
Allison Cohen is frequently interviewed by the popular and business press on consumer issues and trends. Below are excerpts from some articles in which she has been quoted.
Financial Post Canada
Orville resurrected to enliven
brand
By Scott Devea
The campaign is part of a larger push to bring the face of Mr. Redenbacher back to the brand. His mug will soon reappear on packaging after a 15-year hiatus.
Allison Cohen, found of PeopleTalk Research, said the campaign has generated buzz and is a great way to bring attention back to the brand.
“He’s a cartoon character anyway. It’s an interesting way to bring back a cartoonish character, rather than turning him into a cartoon, which they had to do with Colonel Sanders,” she said.
But she said she doesn’t expect that other spokesmen will follow Mr. Redenbacher out of the grave.
“Dave Thomas was not a cartoon character. The thing that made his success was that you felt you were talking to a real person,” she said.…
The Arizona Business Gazette
Phoenix’s prospects improving in advertising, marketing, PR
By Tom Tracey
But is the new wave of technology making the location of an agency irrelevant?
Allison Cohen, founder of PeopleTalk
Research in Wenham, Mass., is a research psychologist who spent
10 years working at New York advertising agencies such as Young & Rubicam and Ogilvy & Mather. Cohen sees it this way.
“I can tell you I really think that the bicoastal market is changing over time,” she said. “Because of the internet, many people telecommute. Or you can just get on a plane to visit a client. It truly doesn’t matter where you are located. Phoenix is one of the fastest growing cities and will grow more and more important in advertising over time.”…
NEWSWEEK
You Are What You Buy
by Annetta Miller with Bruce Shenite & Lourdes Rosado
The scene: the kitchen of Elizabeth Makkay, shopper and mother of three in Putnam Valley NY. For nearly two hours, consumer snoop Allison Cohen has probed the depths of Makkay’s shopping psyche – and the contents of her cabinets, refrigerator and medicine chest. Her mission: to categorize consumers’ shopping styles and determine their response to a new line of products…
Call them the Margaret Meads of Madison Avenue, Cohen is among a new breed of advertising professionals known in the trade as ‘ethnographers’…Cohen embarked on a series of kitchen visits to help give her client, a frozen food purveyor, a better understanding of convenience food eaters. Her purpose: to drive home the message that consumers don’t often cook meals from scratch anymore but rather ‘engineer’ them. As if on cue, her first subject ‘cooked’ a meal consisting of frozen fried chicken, frozen potatoes, frozen onion rings and a frozen pie…
LOS ANGELES TIMES
Ads Aim to Make Some Social Change
by Bruce Horovitz
Los Angeles-area residents are about to face an onslaught of advertising that doesn’t ask us to buy a thing. But the ads are going to ask us to change our lifestyles.
Rebuild L.A. will begin to broadcast public service spots this week with the theme line, ‘Our L.A.’, featuring compelling interviews with residents groping for answers to the city’s racial tensions…And a slew of ads urging Los Angeles commuters to share rides has just kicked off.
’Advertising alone is not enough,’ said Allison Cohen, founder of PeopleTalk, a New York consulting firm. ‘But if the stakes are high enough – and if there are events planned around the campaign that make it look bigger than it really is – these messages will eventually get into your head.’
QUIRK’S MARKETING RESEARCH REVIEW
Up Close And Personal
When Allison Cohen conducts research, she likes to get personal with the respondents…
'I really have been positioned as someone who can help the creative team find out information to make their job of developing advertising easier. I like to put the emphasis where possible on helping them find out up front what it is they need to know before they start making the ads.’
Along with the traditional qualitative…methods, Cohen uses on-site interviewing when it’s appropriate to the project…’I like to talk to consumers where they are, or where they’re thinking about using the particular product or service that we’re interested in. I find that you get fresh insights that way and people are either close to the decision-making process or the usage occasion so it’s easier to get the kind of information we’re after rather than having it be historical and based on memory.’
CHICAGO TRIBUNE
Smoke Signals: Baby Boomers are growing less tolerant of risks
by Pat Widder
They also yearn for simplicity and purity. That means getting down to the essentials, to what really matters. And that means saying no to things.
'We’re in an era of non-ism,’ said Allison Cohen of the New York advertising firm Ally & Gargano. ‘Everybody’s in a bad mood that’s been building for at least a decade,’ she added. ‘Everybody’s skin hurts. We’re not satisfied with any of our choices, with the products available, with the services we get. People have expectations that haven’t been met.’
Still, Cohen is more optimistic than Huber. She thinks people will ‘be adult’ about risks and start saying yes to some things. After all, she noted, her agency represent Weight Watchers. But it also represents Dunkin’ Donuts. ‘And’, she added, ‘they’re both doing very well.’
USA TODAY
Immigration Causes Age, Race Split
by Haya El Nasser & Lorrie Grant
'Everyone realizes that we’re a nation of diversity now, and they want to celebrate it,’ says Allison Cohen, president of PeopleTalk, a market research company in Wenham MA. ‘Americans have come to see diversity in their workplace, in who their friends are.’
USA TODAY
Risque May Be Too Risky For Ads: Marketers react to public opinion
by Bruce Horovitz
'There’s a sense that nobody’s minding the store,’ says Allison Cohen, president of PeopleTalk, an ad consultancy. ‘There’s a real reigning in going on.’
SMITHSONIAN MAGAZINE
Attention Shoppers: Don’t Look Now But You Are Being Tailed
by Erik Larson
Today’s marketers look for hidden truths even in our most mundane acts. Allison Cohen, president of a consulting firm called PeopleTalk, routinely invites herself into homes to videotape people’s cupboards. A client once asked her to find out what ‘home cooking’ means today. ‘The best way to find out was to go watch it,’ Cohen told me. ‘Going in and watching women making dinner was really eye opening because the idea of what constitutes home cooking has changed so drastically in the last generation. Women are now more engineers than they are artists…’
'They (consumers) say things like ‘My God, we had lunch three times that day! And we all ate different things.’ For them, that’s a revelation, because even though it’s a fact of life, they don’t sit down and think about it. They sort of think of themselves as eating three meals a day together.’
AMERICAN DEMOGRAPHICS
Going For The Gross-Out
by Adrienne W. Fawcett
In addition to money, teen boys have time. ‘They’re not in school all day. They get to go home for lunch, and many drive around during free periods,’ says Allison Cohen, president of PeopleTalk, a qualitative research agency in New York and Boston. ‘When they’re not in school, she says, they go to convenience stores to buy things mom doesn’t serve: meat sticks, salty snacks, hero sandwiches, soft drinks’…
Cohen of PeopleTalk agrees that the new (Slim Jim) spots, along with Slim Jim’s affiliation with wrestling and extreme sports, are right on target. ‘The idea of the product as being not mom-endorsed is important,’ she says. ‘It appeals to the behavior teen boys exhibit all day when they are not under mom’s thumb,’ she says. ‘They are enjoying themselves, having fun. The gross-out factor is perfect.’
ADVERTISING AGE
Madison Avenue Visits Dream Land
by Leah Haran
Allison Cohen, president of PeopleTalk, a qualitative market research company, is working with a fragrance marketer that has decided to use the dream concept.
'I was not surprised at all when dreams was the winning concept’, Ms. Cohen said. ‘Dreams are a huge catchall that women can personalize in the direction that would fulfill them most at the moment.’
Ms. Cohen said that about 80% of the women she talked to are sick of sex in advertising, and the idea of dreams sounded new.
ADVERTISING AGE
Americans Walk the ‘Value’ Tightrope
by Leah Rickard
'People want to feel they can justify spending,’ says Allison Cohen, president of PeopleTalk, a marketing consultancy. ‘They will be spending money on things that are meaningful to them.’…Since the 1990s job and economic concerns aren’t going to go away, consumers will continue to favor valued products at reasonable prices. Marketers should communicate their messages in a sober, down-to-earth manner…
ADVERTISING AGE’S MARKETING & MEDIA OUTLOOK
Spirituality, Hope On Horizon As Solace Is Sought
by Leah Rickard
‘As nervousness persists, we are going to see more and more spiritual themes in advertising’, says Allison Cohen, president of PeopleTalk, a marketing consultancy…’It is far more mainstream than we would have thought.’
WALL STREET JOURNAL
Firms See Healthy Sales In Fatty Foods
by Gabriella Stern
‘We’re not going to become a nation of ascetics’, says Allison Cohen, a specialist in consumer behavior… ‘The 90s are going to be the decade of the health-conscious individual, but if (consumers) have to compromise too much it’s not going to sell.’
FORTUNE
Tougher Customers
by Faye Rice
Allison Cohen, senior VP of Ally & Gargano advertising and a psychologist, warns, ‘The savvy shoppers of the early 1980s have been reborn in 1990 into leaner, meaner, more cynical individuals. They are saying to manufacturers, ‘Show me what you’ve got before you earn my trust.’
ADWEEK’S MARKETING WEEK
A Generation of Caregivers: The over-50 set is supporting the whole family
by Marcy Kornreich
'Recognizing this caregiving trend is going to have incredible relevance to marketers in the next 40 years,’ says Allison Cohen, director of Account Planning at New York ad agency Ally & Gargano. ‘These older consumers are buying Depends for their parents and diapers for their grandchildren. They’re the ones modifying or expanding their homes, not downsizing.’…
'They’re still actively involved in family life, and they like to see themselves still at work, still vital parts of the community’, says Cohen. ‘They want to be treated like everyone else.’
