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of Everyday Food
It's not Martha's rap but much larger competitors
By Jeff Bercovici
The launch of Martha Stewart’s new cooking magazine, Everyday Food, is being widely viewed as a major test of how last summer’s insider trading allegations have affected the domestic guru’s ability to market herself to America's homemakers.
To treat it as such, however, isn’t quite fair.
If Stewart stumbles this time out, it will likely be due less to the tarnish on her reputation than to the realities of competition in a particularly crowded and unforgiving magazine category.
In fact, given all the clutter from which it must differentiate itself, if Everyday Food succeeds, it may well be thanks to, not in spite of, the supposedly sullied Martha Stewart brand.
The digest-sized magazine, which offers recipes that can be prepared quickly and without a lot of fancy ingredients, goes on sale today with a cover price of $2.95 and a distribution of 750,000 copies. The initial frequency will be quarterly, with an upgrade to 10 times a year in September if all goes well.
Everyday Foods has received strong initial support from advertisers, with Kraft Foods, General Motors and ConAgra among those to take out space in the first issue.
For that to continue, however, Everyday Foods will have to increase its size extremely fast, says magazine industry consultant Martin Walker.
That’s because the magazine’s editorial approach pits it not so much against upscale epicurean titles such as Gourmet and Bon Appetit as against mass-market titles like Good Housekeeping and Family Circle.
“The problem with this magazine is that it’s really going to have to double or triple its circulation very quickly to work. At 750,000 it has no reach in a market that demands reach,” says Walker. “It’s a packaged-goods mentality. These guys are used to the women’s service books.”
That kind of rapid growth will be a serious challenge, given how many other cooking magazines are already out there. Is there room for another big one, even one with the imprimatur of Martha Stewart?
“My temptation is to say that the magazines already out there have all the bases covered,” says Chris Allen, vice president and publisher of Time Inc.’s Cooking Light.
“But history has always proven that if you come out with something really good and really new there’s always an audience for it. If they are truly going to be doing something new that hasn’t been done before and they’re going to carve out new territory, perhaps there is room for it.”
Everyday Food will certainly be far different from the likes of Gourmet, Food & Wine and Saveur. Its primary competitors will be Cooking Light and another Time Inc. title, Real Simple, which specializes in fast-and-easy recipes and other household shortcuts.
Everyday Food’s most formidable rival, at least in terms of attracting readers, could be Taste of Home, the enormously successful subscription-only cooking magazine from Greendale, Wis.-based Reiman Publications.
The 4.5 million-circulation title, which relies on readers for all of its recipes, became part of Reader’s Digest Association after it bought Reiman last year for $760 million. Taste of Home also has a sister publication, Quick Cooking.
At least Everyday Food won’t have to compete with Taste of Home for advertising; Reiman’s titles are ad free.
One aspect of the new magazine that has prompted much comment is its name: Everyday Food is the first magazine from Martha Stewart Living Omnimedia not to carry Martha Stewart’s name in its title. (The cover does bear the words, in smaller print, “From the kitchens of Martha Stewart Living.”)
In the wake of the scandal surrounding her suspiciously timed sale of stock in a friend’s biotech company a year ago, many believe Stewart’s very name has become a liability.
As evidence, they point to declines in the renewal rate of Martha Stewart Living magazine and in the ratings for her TV program.
“It’s interesting that they chose to downplay her name,” says Walker. “It’s intelligent not so much for the trouble she’s in but in terms of building a company that goes beyond her personal image.”
January 6, 2003
© 2003
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