Whether it was genius insight or something that emerged from her hard push, Martha Stewart has managed to become an icon for gracious living - and that's the value of her brand, and the reason she can monetize what is otherwise a commodity. You got Martha, you got 'gracious', and that's a big deal.

It's like this: in the 50s, if you had money, and wanted others to know you had money, you had to be able to pick out the right clothes. If you had an eye for that, you could do it yourself: otherwise you went to an expensive boutique that would do it for you. You were trying to impress people in the milieu to which you aspired, and those cultured souls likely had 'the eye', or so you thought.

But with the rise of the middle and upper-middle classes, problems emerged. One was that boutiques didn't scale well, so the upwardly mobile had to go to expensive mass-market clothes. Another was, you couldn't be sure that your nouveau-riche or nouveau-upper-middle clod friends could appreciate that you were no longer sporting buck-ninety-nine threads.

So designers like Calvin Klein got the idea of putting the label, or at least the logo, on the outside of the clothes. Problem solved, at least for people who were trying to buy their way into gentile society. Logoware was born, and it's still with us.

But now the problem was how to go to that next level: people could tell your mass-market clothes were expensive, but now how do you convince them that you also live graciously, a real sign of status?

Enter Martha: buy her cookbook, or decorating book, or even her products at KMart, and you have the certified, branded, known-good 'gracious' thing. The stuff looks like the stuff your friends have been seeing on her TV show, in her magazine and on her Web site, and it doesn't hurt to drop her name when people ask where you got the flowers: "Oh, I did them myself - I saw an item in Martha Stewart's magazine".

So, problem solved. Martha nailed 'gracious', and turned it into a $400M franchise... photo courtesy marthastewart.com...
Comments [ ] 3:16:20 PM    

What I most admire is that she's focused on the needs of her core market: time-pressed homemakers who wish to have some level of gracious living on whatever budget they command. And she delivers. The recipes are good, the flower arrangements are attractive.

That's she's competitive, highly focused and can apparently be an S.O.B. should not come as a surprise to anybody who's ever worked in a successful enterprise. People get ahead by focusing and promoting their own interests over other competitors. The top ranks at big companies are full of hard-driving self promoters, if you hadn't noticed.

What's amazing is that someone didn't make the tell-all TV special sooner. Creating value out of thin air - ideas - is exceptionally hard. Doing it with operating systems or advanced search engines is one thing, doing it with recipes and craft projects is something altogether different. I don't expect to like Martha, as charming as the on-screen persona is: I expect the recipes to taste good...
Comments [ ] 10:58:33 AM    

So is buzz dead? Well... depends on what you mean by buzz. If, by buzz, you mean that magic sauce that any marketer can pour on virtually any turkey and make it appealing, that stuff never really existed (except in the minds of some die-hard sales people).

Post-bust, people are more skeptical, less sure that tech has all the answers, and very aware of the actual 1-in-10 probabilities that new technology will spawn successful businesses.

Buzz still happens: Cory Doctorow's book Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom is a recent example. Cory wrote an engaging tale and then made it available for free download.

Unlike boom buzz, that hinted at things that were to come 'real soon now', this is 'fulfillment buzz'. The product is done, and available free for as complete a test drive as a user cares to invest the time in.

The pitch is honest and up front. There are no superlatives or over-reaching claims. "Here it is, here's what it is, please take it if you're interested." As it happens, Cory has a burgeoning reputation for being an interesting guy, which doesn't hurt.

So, wither buzz? My thoughts are: your product has to be very good - read useful and desirable and affordable; you have to make it as transparent as possible to the potential user; and you can forget about pouring a drippy stew of jargon and superlatives on a loser product to make it fly. What sort of enterprise will both generate buzz and prosper from it? Google comes to mind...
Comments [ ] 10:25:18 AM    

Chris Gulker's view from Silicon Valley - in words and pictures