Martha Stewart Stole My Soul
From the headlines: Martha Stewart's neighbors protest her attempt to copyright the name of their town for use on a line of products.
So the residents of Katonah, NY -- a posh enclave originally named for a Native American tribal chief -- don't want Martha Stewart to turn their town into a brand name. Fair enough. But Martha is not exactly setting a precedent here. There are a zillion products named for a place.
But we know Martha well enough to know that this will be different from the Philadelphia Cream Cheese and Nantucket Nectars examples cited by her reps. Martha doesn't sell a product so much as she sells an ideal. If she succeeds, Katonah will not be a word that symbolizes the town of Katonah and its people; it will be a word that symbolizes Martha Stewart's emotional idea of Katonah.
Neighbors -- including fashion designer Ralph Lauren and author Michael Crichton -- were said to be happy when Martha paid $15.2 million for the 152-acre estate in 2000, because there were fears that the property -- which includes five houses, including one from 1784 -- would be divided into parcels by builders looking to put up McMansions. And what's the harm with having a woman who has institutionalized country quaint moving into a neighborhood that thrives on that image?
Well, the harm has come, according to some neighbors. She's now trying to institutionalize "Katonah" and sell it at KMart. Again, she's not the first to use a place name for a brand name, but the situation changed when the neighbors got involved -- her very own neighbors -- and asked her to please, pretty-please, listen-to-our-folk-song-please not copyright the town's name as a marketing tool. When they stepped into the game, they drew a line in the sand. For her to cross it now would not only be a slap in the face to her neighbors, but it would also destroy the very essence she is trying to capture, this idea of... Katonah.
"No one owns Katonah" is the slogan for, and the crux of, the argument against her. Nantucket Nectars and Philadelphia Cream Cheese are poor analogies because they sell a connection to an ideal, not the essence of that ideal. Katonah, in Martha's eyes, is a lifestyle that can be mass-produced and sold. Yet with the people that represent that lifestyle in confederacy against her, she's selling an empty product.
It's time for Martha to do the neighborly thing and abandon the plan.
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