Why is keeping up with the kardashians so popular

Kris, a born devotee of excess, did not come into the public eye to make friends or feign humility; instead, she said yes to every offer that came her way, rendering the Kardashian name utterly inescapable in the process.

Kim did Dancing With the Stars , released a single and a perfume, and did a surprising amount of very bad acting. To some extent, this strategy of aggressive market saturation worked.

Kris managed to make herself and her children massively famous. But then, in , it almost all fell apart. The family would have just done what they pretty much did anyway: broadened their broadcasting to social media channels — Kim joined Instagram in , with the rest of the family quickly following suit — and continued building their fame online.

The loss of KUWTK at that point would have been a setback, but not a game changer, since it had already done what it needed to do: put them on the map as people we paid attention to.

But they needed new content in order to convince their audience to follow them to these new platforms and stay loyal once they got there. Enter Kanye West, whom Kim started dating in Kanye insisted that Kim was A-list long before anyone else took that idea seriously, and the sheer force of his belief — combined with a makeover — actually helped make her a serious star.

Either way, the desire to take her down a peg was ferocious. Around the same time, Kendall Jenner was also able to use her social success to change her career.

In late , she switched over to the Society Management and moved into the world of high fashion. By , she was walking for old-school French brands like Givenchy, Chanel, and Balmain, and forming part of a group of Insta-models — that is, high-fashion models who also had huge social followings — who were alternately lauded as fresh faces and bemoaned as the end of serious fashion , depending on who you asked.

Simpson in his very public murder trial. Kardashian was famously a loving parent and raised his children in a disciplined, yet warm environment. Even after Robert and Kris Kardashian divorced in , with Kris going on to marry Olympian Bruce Jenner, the family stayed very close.

Robert Kardashian died of cancer in , but not before instilling a love of hard work in all his children. The family often credits his example for their success.

She was best friends with Paris Hilton and worked as her stylist. Kourtney Kardashian was on another reality show first, too, called Filthy Rich: Cattle Drive , which was basically like The Simple Life but with a bunch of rich celebrity kids. Their stepdad was Caitlyn Jenner , a gold-medal-winning Olympian who broke a world record. Their dad is Robert Kardashian , who was a public figure after he was one of O.

There are a lot of rumors about that. Kris Jenner has vehemently denied those accusations. But like all celebrities, the Kardashian-Jenners rely on an interested audience to sustain their appeal. And although the Kardashian-Jenners have gained mass appeal by embodying the dominant cultural values of wealth and beauty, they are not for everyone. Not every teenage girl will buy into their beauty standards, or aspire to their wealth. And from a psychological perspective, there is much to be learned from the resilience of these young women — indeed, their example has helped to shape some of my own media literacy programmes.

Love them or hate them, the Kardashian-Jenner sisters have used their intuitive understanding of media and cyber psychology to harness the power of a fast-changing media landscape.