Martha Stewart Living magazine and brand influence

MSLO Events

Current Events for Martha Stewart Living

Incorporated in 1997, though in many ways in existence since the early 1980s, Martha Stewart Living Omnimedia has had a fairly eventful life for a corporation despite the brevity of its history. Built as it is around the knowledge, creativity, personality, and actions of its driving force and namesake, it is perhaps understandable that many of the events that have impacted the company and/or the environment in which it operates are in some way related to the personalities involved in the running of the company, and especially of Martha Stewart herself. Ethical dilemmas and potentially political internal moves of and amongst the company's executive personnel can both be seen as related to an overall internal environment that emphasizes the cult of personality, though there might be conscious moves away from this.

The Maven's New Salary

It is almost impossible to address the manner in which current events of any sort have helped to shape Martha Stewart Living Omnimedia in the past decade without mentioning the imprisonment of the company's founder and figurehead. Those this occurred in the middle of the previous decade, with Stewart released from federal prison in 2005, the memory of the incident and the insider trading that led to her conviction is still quite present in the minds of analysts and other media, and thus continues to have an impact upon the decisions made by the company's officers (Carr 2009). From the branding and direction of the company to determining Stewart's own compensation package, this incident still haunts the company.

In 2009, while Martha Stewart was still legally barred form holding any executive position in her own company due to her conviction and subsequent sentencing, she managed to obtain a more than one-hundred percent increase in her salary despite the troubled economic times, with her compensation climbing from just over two million dollars to just under five-and-a-half million dollars (Carr 2009). Most of this climb was attributed to her new fees for her talent, and it is true that she began to take on more on-air hosting and other direct production duties, but many also see this as a form of compensating Stewart for her lack of an executive position and stock ownership limitations (Carr 2009). In other words, Stewart's imprisonment still has ramifications on her compensation, and on the attitude of the company's executives towards the person and persona of Martha Stewart.

Stewart's salary continued to rise in 2010, though it dropped slightly in the first quarter of 2011 to come in just under six million dollars (Angelo 2011). The leadership of the company has not publicly expressed a desire to diversify beyond Stewart's image and branding, though there have been some internal moves that seem to suggest they recognize the wisdom in this (Carr 2009). None of these moves have been especially successful, however, though ultimately it is the consumer goods or merchandising division of Martha Stewart Living Omnimedia that generates the company's direct profits (Carr 2009). The merchandise sales are of course driven by Stewart's magazines and on-air personality, but it is unclear that the company would have anything to trade on if Stewart weren't there, and her imprisonment continues to highlight this fact.

Communications Positioning

Personnel changes are not always major events in corporations, and indeed they happen quite regularly for no reason other than a desire on the part of an individual to seek out new opportunities. This is largely the reason behind the departure of Martha Stewart Living Omnimedia's Senior Vice President of Communications in 2010, it would seem, and likewise the selection of Sarah Gormsley -- who came from a similar position at IMAX -- to take over as Omnimedia's does not appear to have any direct political motivations (MSLO 2010; NY Times 2010). Certain details about the executive switch, however, seem to indicate that there is a repositioning of the company, its image, and its plans for future growth reflected in this move, however subtle this reflection may in actuality be.

The departing VP had the title Senior Vice President of Communications, but Gormley is entering the company as a Senior Vice President of Communications and Marketing. This slight addition to the job title seems to be signaling both a more cohesive and centralized position for handling the information flow in and out of the company as well as a changing perspective on the way in which information pertaining to the company should be approached generally. With the company's chief executive officer stressing Gormley's experience in "brand positioning" in a statement regarding the hire, it is clear that the company is looking for fresh ideas and a change in its overall image; the brand is one thing that has been very strongly positioned within the company already, but it is too intimately toed to Stewart herself (Carr 2009).