Overview

Welcome to the world of Martha Stewart Living Omnimedia, a world ruled by the brand image of one woman, Ms. Martha Stewart. This brand image is based on a persona that has been built up through years of effective marketing. While Martha Stewart is meant to be viewed as a relatively young, resourceful, American housewife, in truth Stewart is a 64 year old "career woman" who was a model and a stockbroker before she broke into the entertainment industry as a homemaking guru.

Martha Stewart Living Omnimedia is a corporation that encompasses all Martha Stewart brand products. This includes a home décor line, a radio show, two television shows, and five magazines. All Martha Stewart products are designed to coincide with the brand image of Stewart herself. Thus Stewart's website, www.marthastewart.com represents the culmination of several varied but synergistic marketing efforts.

In the company overview, available through www.marthastewart.com, Martha Stewart Living Omnimedia describes itself as being committed to "teaching, innovating, designing and inspiring with ideas and products that make every day more meaningful, more functional,and more beautiful." As Martha Stewart Living Omnimedia seeks to elevate the status of the domestic arts in America, they try to treat all of their products as though they were works of art as well. This includes their central website which is artful (yet functional) in both its design and content.

Click to read about the The Writers and Developers Martha Stewart's Audience The Site's Level of Formality The Visual Cues and Images Genre Variations Forecast

The articles available on Stewart's website are identical to those available through her magazines. As in her magazines, no writers are directly credited for their work on the website. This is not only because of the fact that many of the articles represent the collaborative efforts of several writers, but because ideally, readers are meant to assume that all articles were written by Martha herself. This anonymity as concerns the writers of Martha Stewart Living helps to reinforce the illusion of Martha Stewart's brand image persona.

The writing style of Martha Stewart Omnimedia is alternatively straightforward and artistic. The how-to articles are short and concise, like this one for fun children’s napkins. Others seem to work more at developing a mood or constructing a scene of domestic harmony. Such articles are more long-winded and ostentatious, like this one about embroidering bird patterns.

Martha Stewart's audience seems to be women who match the Martha Stewart persona; they are young, crafty, American houswives. Furthermore, Martha Stewart's website seems to be designed specifically for women who are already familiar with Martha Stewart and her products. The website exists as a supplement to Stewart's print material and not as a substitute. The websites overview touts marthastewart.com as a convenient place for consumers to renew magazine subscriptions, which also helps to explains the website's familiar tone.

Level of Formality

Martha Stewart seeks to portray herself as the friendly neighbor with all the answers.  Reinforcing this idea, the website does not threaten the average reader with a formal tone.  The very short articles are instructional in nature and written in simple sentences.  The unvarying use of just two fonts and the box layout act to reassure readers, page after page, that the site is as familiar and unchallenging as their homes.

However welcoming, the site is still rather formal in it's layout. Organization and categorization seem to be important to the brand image designers of marthastewart.com. Visiters to the site who want to cut through all of this excess, however, are allowed to do so using Stewart's search function. The search can be specialized to focus on recipes, material form Stewart's television shows, or material from the site itself.

As might be expected from the domestic goddess, the site is neatly arranged in columns and visually appealing with several large colorful pictures on each page.  As expected from a savvy business woman, the site is arranged so that there is easy interface. Boxes along the left margin help users navigate the site by product.  Users choose from the media sources television, radio, and print (magazines). There is an extensive use of bullets, coordinating text colors and underlining within each frame. This coordination helps to not only tie the frames together, but to tie the entire site together overall.

At the bottom of each and every page there is a search box and a complete site index, arranged by subject, making the site's formal structure almost redundant.