Popular Culture Review Vol. 12, No. 1, February 2001 | Page 57

Martha Stewart’s Intimate Invitations
To e-commerce
Consumption is women’s work claim Hall and Neitz (107). Today, women are
able to consume from the comfort of home or office via e-commerce. E-commerce
sites provide a new avenue to consumption. Increasingly, these sites apply to every
aspect of consumption. Some e-commerce sites, particularly those offering on
line shopping, may be made more attractive to consumers through the use of
mediated interpersonal communication strategies. These efforts to use Web sites
to market products may expand the way we think about communication.
More than a decade ago, Cathcart and Gumpert described a dynamic interactive
system in which mass media and interpersonal communication are inextricably
intertwined; the system included interpersonal mediated communication as a form
of communication (Gumpert and Cathcart 30). Their theoretical model of
communication “relates our social system to our media of communication and our
individual uses of media to our need for socialization” (Gumpert and Cathcart 25).
Drucker, Tentokali, and Gumpert claim that the “relationship of the private
and public worlds have undergone dramatic changes as a result of developments in
media technologies” (Drucker, Tentokali, and Gumpert 55). One area in which
media technologies, specifically the personal computer, have brought about such
changes is on-line shopping. On-line shopping in virtual marketplaces brings the
public marketplace into the private sphere of the home. A significant difference
between the actual marketplace and the virtual marketplace is that on-line shopping
is shopping in isolation, with no interpersonal interaction between actual
shopkeepers and customers.
Using Cathcart and Gumpert’s theoretical perspective, this article presents a
critical examination of on-line shopping using the Martha Stewart Living
Omnimedia Web site, www.marthastewart.com, as a sort of case study. This Web
site illustrates the exploitation of the illusion of interpersonal mediated
communication. This paper will show that the strategies of mediated interpersonal
communication, a form of interpersonal mediated communication, are used to guide
e-customers through the virtual marketplace of Martha’s Web Store, where
customers are urged to buy nostalgia-oriented products.
The rapid development of this Web site will be chronicled. This will help to
demonstrate the use of this marketing/e-commerce tool to create and satisfy
consumer demand for products associated with the Martha Stewart Living
Omnimedia (MSLO) Web site, magazine, radio and television shows, and books.