This Taboo Tactic Made Her Rich in America.

Kim Kardashian is worth $1.7 billion and growing. Kim is one of the most unexpected and underestimated entrepreneurs of our time. No one has monetized themselves and their image more than Kim Kardashian employing calculated ways to connect to her customers. She made $2 million in sales. In two minutes. Right. She has not stopped despite the controversy. She has used the critics, the haters, and the naysayers to make her bigger. But her uncanning ability to always control the narrative has kept Kim Kardashian raking in cash time and time again. Nothing has more power to change your life than money. And there's no better country to get rich in than America. There's a million ways to get rich in this country. But I'm going to tell you how the most successful did it. This is how to get rich in America. Kim Kardashian has become one of the most recognizable celebrities and business entrepreneurs on planet Earth. What I love about Kim Kardashian, recreates herself, never stops, massive amounts of persistence, and she knows how to convert negativity to be her friend. Welcome to my family. Yes, she was born into a family that was on the edges of fame and fortune, but she's taken what her father started to a completely different level. You really are the platform on which this whole family has risen. Kim Kardashian let the world enter her life through multiple successful TV shows and then years of spinoffs. She harnessed the power of social media marketing and was one of the first to do so. And she's built multiple billion dollar businesses on top of it all. I'm on the cover of Forbes, so I must be doing something right. But to understand how America's sultry sweetheart became an unexpected business mogul, we need to go back to Beverly Hills in the early 2000s at the birth of a new phenomenon called reality TV. What had started as a trend in entertainment now had achieved global success. The reality TV gold rush was on. Paris Hilton is a new breed of celebrity, famous for being famous. New York socialite and the great granddaughter of the famed hoteller Conrad Hilton. Paris Hilton had come to represent a new kind of fly on the wall reality television that simply invited you, the viewer, and me inside the private lives of famous people. Kim's big break as Paris' assistant comes when Paris had a highly publicized falling out with Tara Reade and needed a new BFF to take her place. To the casual observer, Kim merely appears on The Simple Life by chance. A year before she had appeared on The Simple Life, Kim and her mom met with Shiraz Hassan, a media strategist that specialized in making people famous. Kim hoped her exposure on The Simple Life and being photographed by the paparazzi would be enough to get her her own show. But Kim still wasn't famous enough for the network to take a chance. She still needed to find her USP. Your USP is your unique selling proposition. This is a marketing statement that differentiates your product or brand or yourself from all the competitors. Every successful business has a USP. No one will ever show you real value, give you real attention, stop doing what they're doing, and come give you money if there's not something unique. It seems just about every week there's another sex tape coming out of Los Angeles. The latest is an exposition featuring Kim Kardashian. Filmed in Cabo San Lucas with her boyfriend at the time, Ray J, the tape leaked in January of 2007. And overnight, Kim Kardashian becomes the famous person she wants to, if not, notoriety she'd been lacking. Kim K, superstar is now Vivid Entertainment's number one selling sex tape. Kim Kardashian always wanted to be famous. In the story, she knew fame would take her to the next level. I see so many business owners, I don't want fame, I don't want attention. What are you talking about? You cannot get successful without getting attention. Money follows attention, full stop. Soon after this, the network executives at E! Entertainment now warmed to the idea of a reality show following Kim and her family. Why did you make a sex tape? Because I was horny and I felt like it. Instead of running away from the tape, Kim and her mom's slash manager ran straight into the taboo knowing it gave them salacious edge over the competition. Dude, the sex tape, it was her mama's idea. Oh yeah, you're gonna have sex with somebody anyway, let's make it public. Shit. Most of you guys have sex and you don't even get paid for it. They took control of the narrative. They used the taboo to find their USP. There are many ways to make yourself a unique selling proposition. Price could be one. The service delivery. What is something your marketplace is not doing that you could do? Keeping Up With The Kardashians is a breakout hit that is immediately renewed for a second season. Many people find their first success and then rest on their laurels. Kim did anything but this and began pushing everything and anything to bring in more money and more marketing. Welcome to my workout series, Fit In Your Jeans by Friday, Butt Blasting Cardio Steps. Kim is stacking and racking. Hi, I'm Kim Kardashian. I'm really excited to be your host for WrestleMania 24. You gotta stack it to rack it. You can never be satisfied. This is called divine discontent. All the big players talk about, I got halfway up the hill and wanted the rest of it. And when I got to the top of it, I wanted the next mountaintop. You have to keep stacking. Never become satisfied. Kim takes her moment in the spotlight and continues to push the envelope, leaning into her scandalous past by booking a job with renowned Playboy. Right there. Kim pockets 500,000 for the shoot and then uses that shoot as content for her new show. But more importantly, Kim is doing something here called cross-marketing. Cross-marketing is a promotional strategy where two or more companies collaborate to promote each other's products or services. Kim was so aggressive in capitalizing on her newfound fame, she sometimes found herself backing the wrong products. She told everybody, hey, I'm a hairy Armenian. I gotta get lasered all the time. Kim claimed the product was her secret weapon with ladiescaping and negated the need for razors. Kim ended up getting sued, by the way, for making both claims. If she was gonna take the next step as an entrepreneur and be treated like a real deal, she was gonna have to hone in on her brand identity. Brand identity is that manner in which a brand or business represents itself to the public. My brand identity is raw, transparent, and authentic. For Kim's brand identity, she would have to lean into what was working for her, and that was connecting to her customers by letting them in into every aspect of her world. Like, I feel good in this one, but I also don't wanna be super boring. Celebrities by nature had previously been remote and inaccessible. Kim turned that practice on its head. You're a new kind of celebrity. You don't have to be playing basketball. You don't have to be singing. It's your persona that drives your brand. By stacking success, Kim took what was, for many, 15 minutes of fame, and found her brand identity. Look, by 2009, Kim's paid endorsements and TV show earnings had pocketed her $10 million, but by 2011, she had doubled that and stacked the cherry on top of her already big successes when she engaged and wed basketball superstar Chris Humphreys on a two-hour E! exclusive, Keeping Up with the Kardashians season finale. Oh, you're stuck with me forever. Look, this wasn't just a fairy tale come true. It was an $18 million payday, $2.5 million for the photo rights, $15 million for the TV rights. The estate was given to her for free. Farrah Wayne threw in three dresses at Duke Charge, $400,000 of free champagne. Even the cake was free. The 10-tier chocolate chip $15,000 wedding cake didn't cost Kim Kardashian a penny. Most people shell out their entire life savings and go into debt to marry their prince or princess charming of their dreams. But what does Kim do? She pockets $6 million just for giving people the opportunity of seeing it and the vendors the privilege of participating. But what starts as a fairy tale wedding would lead to a nightmare marriage. You know, things really started to break down shortly after they got married when they moved to New York. The backlash was fast and fierce. The brand that Kim had built and based on authenticity with one filing, she faced her most serious adversity yet. It's October, 2011, and just a couple of months since their wedding, Kim's marriage is already on the rocks. Kim understood how this could jeopardize everything she'd built, so she started controlling the narrative. On her new spinoff, audiences get to see the troubled relationship frayed at the edges and the most vulnerable Kim Kardashian yet open up. She's opening up about being a failure in this marriage. Though Kim would file for divorce only 72 days into her marriage, Kim deftly sidesteps cancellation by controlling the narrative. With her failed marriage behind her, 2012 would be another banner year for Kim Kardashian as she doubled her income again, bringing in $20 million through her endorsement deals and the renewal of now multiple reality shows she was part of. But a hot new trend in how we communicate was about to disrupt traditional marketing and advertising. Despite an unknown future of how social media could be used for business, Kim immediately saw its potential engaging with her followers on a daily basis. And to stay on top of this emerging opportunity, Kim set out to break the internet. I'm Josie, and I've got the story of the shot that is breaking the internet. Paper magazine typically hit a big number is 25,000 views. The day Kim's ass went live, 15 million. Kim's reported payday for burying it all, a whopping $0. Kim did this shocking shoot for no money, and it stirred up a lot of controversy for her. Lean into the controversy. In the beginning, they're gonna ignore you, and then they're gonna criticize you, and then they're gonna hate you. They tried to stop Elvis, they tried to stop Eminem, they put Jesus Christ on a cross. And what are you doing, crying about a little criticism? Bad news. Speed's around this planet faster than good news, and it's exactly what Kim Kardashian has done. She created it, fueled it, and then used it to bring her to another level. Nearly a billion Instagram followers, enough to form the third most populous country in the world. We call it Kardashian-stan. In early 2015, Kim Kardashian has paid $500,000 for a single Instagram post. More in one post than the President of the United States makes in one year. This rate would then rise to $1 million for a single post, netting $85 million in 2015, earning her a much-deserved place on Forbes Most Influential Celebrities 100 list. The same year, Kim also tied the knot once more, this time to fame rapper, fashion mogul Kanye West. Kanye brings to Kim's attention that her years of paid endorsement was actually leading to a brand dilution problem for Kim. Brand dilution occurs when a company releases, or in Kim's case, promotes a product that doesn't align with the company or brand's original mission. Apart from being a highly successful artist, Kanye West also had his own clothing line, Yeezy, and they'd grown into a billion-dollar brand. Now with Kanye West on her arm, the time was right for Kim to leverage the popularity of her signature makeup look. Kim's inspiration to take the leap to creating her own company was hiding in her shadow. Her sister, Kylie Jenner, had launched her own cosmetic line called Kylie Cosmetics a year earlier, and seemingly overnight, it had catapulted Kylie's network to be even higher than Kim's. I'm so excited to announce, you guys, that I'm launching KKW Beauty. In June 2017, KKW Beauty launched its first product, Creme Contour, in the Highlights Kit, alongside a brand-new Kim K Controversy. Kim Kardashian is under a lot of fire right now. She tweeted out a photo, and everybody was accusing her of basically putting on blackface. It's her first product launch of her new company, and how she handles this controversy will determine the fate of her new business. It's the summer of 2017, and Kim has just launched her first beauty company, KKW Beauty. But Kim already finds a company dealing with controversy over the marketing photos for its first product, a contour and highlighting kit. She said, quote, I would obviously never want to offend anyone. I use an amazing photographer and a team of people. At this point in her career, Kim literally thrives on these types of controversies, and if anything, leans into them to keep her products in the public eye. As KKW got off the ground, Kim ingeniously geared every aspect of her company to take advantage of her prominent position in the public eye. Unlike most brands, Kim didn't need a shelf in a store to get her product in front of the consumer, and she didn't need to spend millions on the standard marketing channels. This is what I do when I am on the road, and I want to look defined. Kim was able to cut out the middleman in both distribution and marketing by going DTC. DTC is selling direct to consumer, a business model that was popularized first with websites, and now is being supercharged by Kim using social media. Never before in the history of business could you go direct to a consumer. Look, I've raised over a billion dollars over the internet, and never, ever paid out one penny to a broker, an agent, or a bank. Going direct to consumer is cheaper for you and better for your customer. Kim sold her products online, and she leaned into content marketing, an extension of how she always communicated with her fans when she was back on TV. Kim's launch of KKW Beauty was successful in cutting out the middleman, generating $13 million of sales in less than two hours. After it was launched, a year later, KKW expanded into eyeshadows, concealers, lipsticks, fragrances, and is bringing in $100 million of annual revenue. Everything from the scent to the bottle design to the campaigns, everything is really me. In 2020, three years after she launched, beauty giant Kody purchases 20% share in KKW Beauty for $200 million. This deal with Kody gives KKW a value of $1 billion. She's become a mogul, a giant in beauty, but was hungry for more. She never had enough, and was gonna keep stacking the success by launching another company, this time in fashion. With Kim's new fashion venture, she's found a need in the market that would connect her with her customers. But her choice of name for the company created an international incident. Kim Kardashian West has faced accusations that she is culturally appropriating the name and misrepresenting Japanese garments. For her new brand, Kim has chosen the word kimono as a nod to herself, Kim, and the skilled Japanese designers put it into their iconic work. The problem was, the public didn't see it the way Kim saw it. The mayor of Kyoto sent Kim a letter demanding she drop the name from her brand. Be ready to pivot. Customer perception of your brand can change rapidly. The winners know how to move quick. Hey, I made a mistake, make a decision. Don't back it up. Don't try to support it. Don't try to push the blame off on somebody else. Pivot, make the move. Kim immediately understood the crisis for her new company and decided to pivot the name of the company despite being deep into her launch. I need a name that really does speak to me the way that kimono did. And then raise your hand if you like Skims. Okay, more people like Skims. When Kim finally launches Skims, it sold out in two minutes. And she made $2 million in sales in that time. In two minutes. Right. Since then, it's expanding into various other clothing lines, and in 2021, became the official underwear of the U.S. Olympic team. In 2021, Kim is listed on Forbes billionaire list for the first time ever. Today, Skims is worth $4 billion. And that $4 billion worth of equity created by Kim in just four years. Bringing Kim's personal network to $1.7 billion. Think of that. This is the beauty of America. She does one dumb ass sex tape and ends up being a billionaire. This is one way to get rich in America. That's without being a famous singer, an athlete, or even having business school behind her. And she knows how to convert negativity to be her friend. Even Kim's naysayers have to respect what she's building. It goes to show you that anyone has the power to amass a fortune. Every individual and every business has a story. If you're not controlling the narrative, someone else will control the narrative. Fear not what the haters say along the way, because fortune favors the bold. This is how you get rich in America.