CHAPTER TEN 

Only a month after the first episode of Keeping Up with the Kardashians aired, E! announced that it had ordered a second season. “The buzz surrounding the series is huge, and viewers have clearly fallen for the Kardashians,” the network’s VP for series development announced.

For many, the instant success of their TV show and its accompanying fame and fortune would have been enough. For Kris Jenner, it was only a beginning. Today it is common to hear the media referring to the Kardashians as a “brand.” From the moment the first episode of Keeping Up with the Kardashians aired, that is exactly the word that was going through Kris’s head. As a manager with a financial stake in her daughters’ careers, the most logical step would have been to focus on the highly bankable Kim, who was already in great demand before she became a reality-TV personality. She had done a high-profile campaign for Christopher Brian apparel, and the calls had already been pouring in with offers of personal appearances, modeling assignments, and other ventures. Kris had already quietly incorporated a company, Jenner Communications, to handle it all, along with Bruce’s career and the new TV show.

On top of Kim’s burgeoning popularity, she was also the lowest maintenance of the kids by far. Khloé had recently been busted for a DUI and failure to enroll in an alcohol-treatment program and sentenced to a jail stint at the same facility where Paris had served her time. Although she appeared happy-go-lucky on air, she was still deeply troubled behind the scenes and was known for her hard-partying ways. Rob was focused on school, and Kourtney was busy running the D-A-S-H boutique in Calabasas that she and her sisters had started in 2006 but was really her baby. Kris would later compare each of her daughters to a dance. Kourtney, she described as a tango—“spicy and difficult at times”; Khloé, a salsa—“sassy and all over the place”; and Kim, a waltz—“easy, smooth and beautiful.”

Besides Kim, none of them seemed like a logical candidate for a career in the public eye—at least not outside the tight confines of their reality show. Kris thought otherwise. She saw the show as what she called a “vehicle” to create a family empire, and she was tireless in her mission.“There was no way to do this half-assed,” she recalled in her memoir. “I knew I could not do this as a hobby, or part-time, or just a couple of hours a day. This job required that I live, breathe, eat, sleep it 24/7, and once I decided to do that . . . there was no turning back.”

She was now more than just a wife and mother, she reflected; she was a “producer, manager, negotiator, a publicist, a business manager, a stylist, and at times a caterer and set decorator.” And although Kris is known to engage in hyperbole and often to downplay the contributions of her extensive staff, in the beginning she undeniably performed all those functions and more. In Kim, she also had a partner whose business savvy was arguably as sharp as her own, having watched and observed the phenomenal success of Paris Hilton close up.

However, Kim would tell journalist Jo Piazza that when she initially sat down with her mother to talk about a business model as early as 2007, they agreed that they would not necessarily follow the Paris Hilton example, although it was a “good start.” Instead, she explained, “We make our own model. My mom and I talk about it all the time.” In the first year or two, however, it was hard not to draw obvious parallels between the two socialites, who had both shot to fame on the notoriety of their sex tapes.

In her 2011 book Celebrity Inc., about the way celebrities cash in on their fame, Piazza analyzed the similarities and differences between Kim and Paris. She found that Kim had the advantage of learning from Paris’s mistakes and, unlike Paris, had few friends beside her sisters. The tight-knit family had its built-in advantages, and Kim trusted nobody outside the clan.

Piazza believed the success of each reflected their respective eras. “Hilton represented all the excesses of Bush-era wealth and conspicuous consumption,” she wrote, “whereas Kardashian, despite her upper-class income, displayed a work ethic worthy of the middle class. Ask any of the Kardashians about their success and they will pepper their answers with work, work, work.”

Indeed, when Redbook editor in chief Jill Herzig spent time with the Kardashians for a profile, she was struck by two things.

“The Kardashians are nothing if not joyful,” she wrote, “and they are the hardest workers you will ever meet. They wake up at 5AM, and they work until they fall down at night. Kim was tweeting from a Golden Globes party at 3AM, and then there she was at 6AM, chipper, professional and ready to do her thing.”

Paris too worked hard to create her brand, but that was not the image she cultivated for her fans, who were happy to see her as a ditzy party girl spending her inherited millions. But as Piazza noted, Kim also gained an early reputation for being a “nice girl.” Throughout her peak years, Paris was notorious for her bad behavior—drug busts, pantiless paparazzi photos, even controversial racist and homophobic tirades, such as the time she called a male friend a “faggot” or told the camera “we’re like two niggers” while dancing at a club. Paris was also known to have no time for the little people and would often refuse to look her fans in the eye. At the time, it was an important part of her appeal.

“The part that I don’t understand,” observed Eric Hirschberg, president of the marketing giant Deutsch Inc., in 2006. “Paris has this meanness that’s in her persona. And it’s embraced. Girls from the kind of places she makes fun of on The Simple Life want to wear her perfume. Her job is to party. She seems to answer to no one. . . . And there’s a bit of anarchy there—she’s like the princess running around the palace knocking over vases.”

Meanwhile, Kim from the outset would often linger for hours signing photographs or posing for selfies with fans, while always smiling and interacting with them. By most accounts, she doesn’t do drugs and rarely drinks. She only shows up at clubs when she is paid to do so and always leaves before midnight. In fact, she rarely swears, and never in public.

“I remember this one time when I used the F-word—and everyone was like, I can’t believe you said that!” she told The Guardian. “You never say that! I am really cautious about what I say and do. If I look at the message I’m portraying, I think it definitely is be who you are, but be your best you.”

She was also very candid about her body-image issues, which struck a chord with many of her young fans and set her up as a role model of sorts, at least in the early years. The constant mention on the show of her “booty” became a recurring theme in the tabloids and Kris was quick to credit her Armenian appetite for her most famous asset.

“I don’t ever really diet because I don’t want to be miserable,” she once told a reporter. “I love food.” Kris quickly struck an endorsement deal with Kim to model Bongo Jeans, which promised to show off the famous butt to good advantage.

“I’m not your typical stick-skinny model,” she said, promoting the jeans. “There are super-skinny girls doing ad campaigns and I don’t think it’s realistic. I don’t like that [skinny] body image. I’m very proud of my body image.”

And yet when GNC came calling about having the family promote “weight loss supplements,” Kris was thrilled, sending just one more of the mixed messages that the public would receive from the Kardashians over the years, as the entire family is seen on the show ingesting the diet cleanse QuickTrim and shilling for it in interviews and on social media.

Jeans and supplements were only the beginning. Before long, the Kardashian name was tied to a long line of merchandise, fashion, and product endorsements in rapid succession. But who was buying?

Kim told a British reporter that she considers her typical fan “a younger girl, like 15 or 16, who loves fashion, loves to be a girly girl, loves beauty, glam.”

That wasn’t much different from Hilton’s target demographic. Was there room enough for two socialite reality-TV stars to compete for the pocket money of young girls leading mundane lives and desperate to bathe themselves in the glamor and fabulous lifestyles of these celebrities?

By the time the Kardashians came along to do battle for the hearts and pocketbooks of this demographic, Paris—shrewd businesswoman in her own right and surrounded by handlers who had been crunching the data—sensed that she needed to tweak her ebbing brand.

“With Paris, there’s so much debauchery and valuelessness to her brand, she’ll have to figure out a way to get past that,” Hirschberg told the Baltimore Sun in August 2006. “There needs to be some humanity.”

Given what we saw when Kim Kardashian reached a similar point in her career a few years later, it’s instructive to look at how Paris was trying to reposition herself in the months before her protégée burst onto the scene. In late 2006, she released an album, Paris, on the Warner label, clearly targeted at the urban market. It appeared to be working. Its reggae-inspired single, “Stars Are Blind,” became the most requested song in both the New York and LA markets, and Paris immediately launched an aggressive media campaign to announce her rebranding.

“I haven’t accepted money from my parents since I was 18,” she told the Baltimore Sun. “I have things no heiress has. I’ve done it all on my own, like a hustler.”

Words like hustler started to feature in her interviews, which began to take on a decidedly “street” tone. Watching the noticeable shift in her branding, one paper observed that she was self-consciously trying to align herself with “hip-hop’s boot-strap ethos.” Indeed, she began hanging out with hip-hop artists and was frequently photographed in urban music clubs instead of the vapid, party-till-you-drop LA hot spots with which she had always been associated.

“I love hip-hop,” she declared in an interview promoting Paris. “I grew up listening to Dr. Dre. With the hip-hop world, they came from nothing, from the streets. I respect their turning into these huge stars with huge mansions, all on their own.” And while she had for years played up her image as a wealthy heiress, which was a central theme of The Simple Life, she now disingenuously made a conscious effort to distance herself from that image, almost to the point of absurdity.

“When I moved to L.A., I swear on my life I didn’t have anything,” she said, failing to note that her previous address had been New York’s swanky Waldorf Astoria. “I told my mom I didn’t want any money. And I’ve done it all on my own. All this, I bought for myself: my cars, my house. Who can say that at my age who’s an heiress?”

She proceeded to sign on to star in a futuristic musical-comedy/horror film called Repo! The Genetic Opera, in which she played a character named Amber Sweet, who is addicted to surgery and Zydrate, a potent illegal opiate extracted from dead bodies, which Amber obtains from a grave robber in exchange for sex. The movie wasn’t particularly well received but it succeeded in giving her a grittier image. It’s entirely possible that if Paris had successfully continued on this course, there would have been no opening for Kim and her family to usurp her place in the immensely lucrative teen-girl and young-female market that would be their bread and butter for the next decade. The turning point, from a brand-marketing perspective, appears to be Hilton’s appearance on David Letterman’s show only a week before Keeping Up with the Kardashians debuted on E!.

Paris was in full-tilt rebranding mode when she appeared on Letterman to promote a new fragrance line in September 2007. The talk show king’s hip, sophisticated, urban audience was just the demographic that Paris was looking toward to expand her retail empire. Her recent stint in prison was a mixed blessing, because it had the potential to bolster her urban credibility but had somewhat undermined it when her connections had at first appeared to keep her out of jail and then helped keep her isolated in the infirmary for her entire stay.

Letterman had apparently agreed to her handlers’ demands that he refrain from asking her about jail. It worked with Larry King who had, in his typical fashion, lobbed nothing but softballs at her. Similarly, Letterman was not known as a hard-hitting journalist but, after asking her if she liked New York, he wasted no time cutting to the chase. “So how did you find your time in jail?” he asked. Left uncharacteristically speechless, Paris answered, “Not so much,” before squirming through a rapid series of uncomfortable additional questions about the food and whether she had made any friends. When an audience member yelled out, “I love you, Paris!” the host immediately asked if it was someone she had met in jail. “Now you’re making me sad,” she pouted.

Finally, she lost it. “I’m not answering any more questions about it,” she retorted. “I’m here for my clothing line, my movie, and my perfume.” When that still didn’t stop the questions, she snapped, “I’ve moved on with my life so I don’t really want to talk about it anymore.”

Seemingly willing to acquiesce and help her shill for her new perfume, Letterman proceeded to spray it on himself and then down the entire bottle as Paris looked on, mortified.

By the following morning, her rebranding had appeared to suffer a spectacular setback, as clips of her appearance and the resulting buzz reduced her to a punch line that she never really appeared to transcend. More important, it left a giant void for a new reality star to fill.

While promoting her new album a year earlier, Paris had declared, “The book, the perfume, the show, the album. I wanted to do the album last because I wanted to do it like no one else has ever done it before. I don’t think there’s ever been anyone like me that’s lasted. And I’m going to keep on lasting.”

Indeed, Paris never went away. But, as Jo Piazza noted, she appeared to cede the domestic market to the new upstarts as she refocused her fragrance and clothing lines overseas, especially on Japan, where Paris is still a marketing force.

When Kim emerged as a phenomenon soon after, there was one thing she definitely had in common with Paris Hilton. Both could command hefty fees just to show up at a club or event. By 2011, Kim was getting anywhere from $100,000 to $250,000 to fly to an ordinary club appearance, and as much as $1 million for New Year’s Eve. “The appearances are good moneymakers,” she told Cosmopolitan. “And they’re also a great way for me to connect with people in places like Oklahoma, where I never would go otherwise.”

At one such paid appearance at a Las Vegas pool party, somebody asked Khloé whether she thought Kim was the new Paris Hilton. “No. I think she is way better than Paris Hilton,” Khloé replied. “I think she’s the new Kim Kardashian. Kim has her own title. She doesn’t need anybody else’s.”

Paris signaled that she was resentful of Kim’s success when she told a radio interviewer that Kim’s butt “looks like cottage cheese inside a big trash bag.” For her part, Kim graciously pretended that there was no bad blood between the two former friends, even though she acknowledged that the two didn’t speak anymore.

“I definitely respect everything she’s done,” she told a reporter, when asked whether there was a feud. “She’s very cool and has done so much in her life, and she’s taught me so much, just being a friend for so long. But I don’t look at it like that. I mean, I guess you would see the comparisons—the reality shows and stuff like that—but I don’t know. I’m kind of like the sisterhood, with my sisters and my family. I’ve never thought of myself like that.”

By 2011, according to Piazza, more Americans had heard of Hilton than Kim Kardashian (97 percent to 90 percent). But in every other way, Kim had surpassed Paris, according to the Davie Brown Index, which determines a celebrity’s marketing value to a corporate brand.

“Kardashian had a stronger appeal score (59 vs. 45 out of a possible 100),” Brown wrote, “was more likely to be a trendsetter (66 vs. 55), had more endorsement potential (63 vs. 48), and was more aspirational (56 vs. 42). More brands wanted to sign Kardashian for endorsement deals, more consumers wanted to buy products that would allow them to be like her, and the public simply liked her more than they liked Hilton.”

It was quickly becoming clear that there was a new girl in town, and Paris had been deposed from her throne. And although there were many marketing strategies that the two former friends had in common while building their brands, there was one in which Kim was in a league by herself, social media, which didn’t really exist when Paris was at her peak. By 2012, Kim had fourteen million followers on Twitter, surpassing even Barack Obama. Eventually she would storm the new social media platform Instagram, where she would amass more “likes” than even Katy Perry, the queen of Twitter.

Kris didn’t really understand the ins and outs of social media. But it didn’t take her long to figure out how to profit from Kim’s massive following. She let it be known that Kim’s Tweets were for sale, and soon her daughter was shilling for a wide range of products. Although her fees vary depending on the product and the circumstances, Joan Barnes, president of Atlanta-based Marketing Specifics, revealed to the New York Post that a social-blogging company told her it had arranged for Kim to be paid $25,000 by Armani for just one Tweet. It soon became apparent why she commands such exorbitant fees. The Tweet drove forty thousand users to the Armani website in less than twenty-four hours. “Somebody who paid a million dollars would be tickled to get that level of response for a campaign,” Barnes told the Post.

Witnessing Kim’s Twitter success, Kris urged all the kids to devote a certain amount of time to social media, including blogs, Facebook posts, Twitter, and Instagram.

Kim described for the Hollywood Reporter how she uses social media to incorporate her massive fan base into the family’s marketing strategies.

“I have a blog that has 40 million hits a month,” she explained. “People leave comments: ‘What shoes do you wear, and what lip gloss do you use?’ My mom told us, ‘So why not be a brand for our fans and give them what they want?’ Many of our ideas [about what to endorse] come from our fans and then our mother makes it happen.”

Meanwhile, Kris was busy, adding new ventures for her family every day. In 2008, the entire family competed on the celebrity edition of the TV game show Family Feud, hosted by Al Roker, against the family of football player Deion Sanders.

Not long afterward, Kim agreed to appear on season 7 of the popular ABC show Dancing with the Stars. It seemed like a good opportunity to introduce her to a mainstream audience, and Kim jumped at the chance. She probably later wished that she hadn’t, because she was paired with professional dancer Mark Ballas and became the third contestant voted off the show. The judges described her performance as “cold,” and Ballas later said that Kim “wasn’t the best dancing partner.”

A year later, she tried her hand at drama, signing on to appear in four episodes of the Nickelodeon surfer-themed show, Beyond the Break, playing a girl named Elle who is very possessive of her artist boyfriend and is willing to crush anybody who gets in her way.

“The most challenging part of playing the role of Elle was just trying to be the mean girl,” she told People. “I’ve never really been that outspoken girl. It’s the confrontation that I’m not used to, so I think doing that was really kind of refreshing in a weird, sick way.” A year later, she would get behind the camera to produce a reality show called The Spin Crowd, following the employees of a Hollywood PR firm. The show was not well received and was cancelled after only eight episodes, but not for lack of effort on Kim’s part. According to the show’s central character, Jonathan Cheban, Kim went above and beyond the call of duty to promote the show. “She is the busiest woman I have ever met,” he observed, “and yet once the show started, she was out promoting it on the Today show and on Twitter. She never flakes on you. That’s what sets her apart. Her business model is about morals and standards, never screwing anybody and never flaking out.”

And if the failure of The Spin Crowd proved that not everything the Kardashians touched turned to gold, their decision to lend their name to a prepaid debit card reconfirmed it. At the splashy launch party at New York’s Pacha nightclub, the family gushed at how excited they were about the Kardashian Kard. They even alleged that the card had a higher social purpose.

“When we were growing up, we didn’t have credit; we didn’t know what it was like to try and get your first credit card,” Kim told Entertainment Tonight. “But with this one you don’t need credit; you don’t even need a bank account.

“We wanted to provide people with something where they could learn their budgets; there is a spending limit on it. We are so excited that so many people are into this idea.”

But it soon became apparent that the Kard was riddled with a slew of outrageous fees, leaving the parents of teenagers, who were the target market, fuming. Although a typical prepaid debit card is free, a twelve-month Kardashian Kard cost $99.95 just to own, including a monthly fee of $7.95. On top of that, users had to shell out $1 every time they added money to the card and $2 per transaction to pay bills automatically with the card. Soon after the Kard was launched, the Connecticut attorney general issued a strong rebuke to its manufacturer, questioning whether the Kard’s “pernicious and predatory” fees were legal.

“Among the prepaid debit cards now on the market, the Kardashian Kard is particularly troubling because of its high fees combined with its appeal to financially unsophisticated young adult Kardashian fans,” wrote Richard Blumenthal. “Keeping up with the Kardashians is impossible using these cards. This card—or kard—appears to specifically target young adults in evoking the name and image of the Kardashian family who showcase lives of luxury and extravagance. Known for their reality show—Keeping Up with the Kardashians—the family is marketing a dangerous financial fantasy.”

Only a month after the launch and a barrage of negative publicity, the Kardashian family attorney announced that they were pulling out of the venture, claiming that the “negative spotlight . . . threatens everything for which they have worked.”

Their association with QuickTrim also came under fire, after a group of customers filed a class-action suit against the Kardashians for “unsubstantiated, false and misleading claims” in ads, interviews, and Tweets about the efficacy of the supplement. The sisters had been hawking the pills and cleanses for years in various forums, including the reality show, Twitter, and interviews where they talked about the wonders of the supposed miraculous weight-loss supplement, which, according to the lawsuit, implied that QuickTrim “curbs cravings,” “promotes weight loss,” and “burns calories.”

“Just did an amazing pilates class with @KimKardashian,” Khloé Tweeted in 2010. “That and a little QuickTrim and my bikini bod will be ready in no time.”

Their association with the product had reportedly netted the family millions since 2009, but it soon emerged that the primary ingredient was in fact a massive dose of caffeine, which the Food and Drug Administration had ruled was not a safe or effective weight-loss tool.

Eventually, the lawsuit was dismissed by a New York court, which ruled that a similar lawsuit had already been settled in California. But it was yet another reminder that the family needed to be more vigilant in their choice of endorsements if they were to safeguard their brand.

To that end, the family and especially Kim were playing a hands-on role in the creation of their own products. As Kim knew well, Paris Hilton’s most successful venture was her line of perfumes—Paris Hilton for Women—which had mushroomed into a $2 billion fragrance empire, especially overseas.

Kris wasted no time in securing the infrastructure to start a family-branded perfume business of their own. In 2009, Kim launched a perfume line heralded by what would become her signature fragrance, Kim Kardashian by Kim Kardashian. It soon became the number-one-selling fragrance of the year for the beauty chain Sephora. By November 2010, Kim had reached number one on top of the celebrity loyalty list—which gauges consumer engagement with entertainment personalities—compiled by the consumer research company Brand Keys.

“There was a time when Paris Hilton topped that list, when she was the most famous person for being nothing we had ever seen,” noted branding expert Robert Passikoff at the time. He also noted that many consumers associated Kim with entrepreneurship, much more so than other celebrities, including Paris Hilton.

And although the family was widely mocked and their show regularly dismissed as vapid fluff, the stuff of tabloid trash, the respectable media was beginning to take notice of the Kardashians’ remarkable marketing clout and multimillion-dollar product empire. Curious about who was buying these products, the New York Times sent a reporter to the launch of a new Kim Kardashian line at the fashionable Bebe boutique. Discovering a line one hundred deep, they asked the fans what Kim represented for them.

“The average girl,” replied a twenty-two-year-old Pennsylvania woman who worked for a D.C.-based political-media-buying company. “She represents fashion,” said a twenty-two-year-old Bronx waitress. “I like the way she dresses.” “She has an ethnic sex appeal,” said a twenty-six-year-old Queens paralegal. “I like how she created a franchise with her sisters. That opens a lot of opportunities for women who have a spark of beauty and want to shine. She reminds me of Sophia Loren.” A twenty-one-year-old Australian tourist took note of Kim’s famous figure. “She stands out from every other celebrity in the world. She is natural and curvaceous. There are too many thin celebrities out there who make women feel they are overweight.”

Whether it was the twentysomething working women who attended the jewelry launch or the tween girls who snapped up the Kardashian Silly Bandz Glam Pack during the twistable-rubber-band craze a year earlier, the Kardashians had brilliantly tapped into a profitable niche and had become what celebrity talent broker Ryan Schinman had described as “Kardashian Inc.”

The importance of Kim to the family brand was obvious and hard to escape. But the show had created at least two other celebrities, and Kris was not going to miss the chance to milk her 10 percent commission from her other offspring.

As early as the first season, in fact, it is now clear, Keeping Up with the Kardashians was deliberately molding the image of each Kardashian with an eye to potential marketing opportunities. While the debut episode famously attempted to rehabilitate Kim’s slutty sex-tape image and position her as the good girl by turning the tables on a Playboy shoot, it is instructive to look back on episode 5 of that same season.

In it, the family gathers at Robert’s favorite Armenian restaurant to observe the fourth anniversary of his death. Later, Khloé—still devastated by remembering her beloved father—is seen having a meltdown at the D-A-S-H boutique. She ends up going to a club and getting drunk. On her way home, she is pulled over by the police and given a field sobriety test, which she fails.

The next day, Kris goes out to lunch with Kim, who eventually tells her that Khloé is in jail. Kris freaks out and calls Robert Shapiro, who got O.J. acquitted. Eventually, Kris picks up Khloé and they argue about whether to tell Bruce. When they do, he gives her a lecture and says he wonders what her dad would have thought.

It is entertaining and dramatic TV, except that Khloé was actually busted for DUI in March, before Keeping Up with the Kardashians even got the green light. The whole thing had been staged. But a brief onscreen disclaimer had in fact warned that “This episode features re-creations of actual events,” so the producers had covered themselves with viewers who were aware of the chronology. Still, it was a harbinger of things to come, and would add fuel for critics who assert that just about everything about the show is scripted.

More significantly at the time, however, it set up Khloé as the bad-girl foil to her good sister Kim. Although Paris Hilton’s star was already waning, she had proved that there was a significant demand for the bad-girl image that she represented.