Broadsheets, red tops, mags, blogs and vlogs were ablaze with news of the Skims shapewear and clothing brand readying to open a store on London’s famous Regent Street.

Last valued on the open market in 2023, the Kim Kardashian co-owned brand has been flying, and is now likely worth a fair chunk more than the $4bn it was guesstimated to be worth back then. So, it shouldn’t be newsworthy that it’s found a physical home on one of the world’s busiest shopping streets. But it is.

That Kim K gold dust will obviously drive page views for the consumer titles, but for those of us in the marketing world, this sort of URL to IRL transition should increasingly be considered an optimal marketing strategy.

Pixels vs. reality: The marketing dilemma

I’ve got a sneaking suspicion that over time, us marketing folk have unknowingly portioned our thinking into ‘what happens in pixels’ and ‘what really happens’. The internet is an unfathomably large and complex ecosystem, driven by mammoth amounts of data pinging around the world in nanoseconds. Crypto coins launch, spike, crash and fail in days. Celebs are made, held aloft and dethroned in weeks and trends are more fleeting than ever. Remember the Harlem Shake? OK boomer.

What happens online is such a full world, with its own rules and conventions, that it’s hard to make it all relate to our lived world experiences. Sniffing the milk to see if it’s gone off or checking how long the tumble dryer has left couldn’t be further from misogynist trolls on Twitter X, or yet another thirst trap on Insta.

So when the worlds do collide, it’s all a bit jarring.

But it’s not totally our fault. The internet is virtual. The very definition of that word is a bit confusing - “Not real, as such…”. To see this #ViralMegaBrand appear in bricks and mortar a stones throw from Liberty is messing with our brains. We knew Skims was real, but now it’s really really real.

In our day jobs across marketing, advertising, media and social, it’s easy to forget that impressions are real eyeballs in people's heads, and conversions are real money leaving someone’s bank account. 

Social media has always mirrored the basic behaviours of the societies and communities we build in the real world, but culturally, it’s taken some time. It wasn’t long ago that memes were a subculture. Hastily and shoddily thrown together jpegs making niche references to in-jokes from 4chan forums. As it grew and matured, it became youth culture; trends and viral moments shared by younger generations for entertainment. But then your mum started sharing these funny videos with you on WhatsApp and it grew again, into ‘internet culture’.

Social isn’t a side project - it’s the culture

As we hit such proliferation and saturation, at some point we should probably acknowledge that it’s no longer meme, youth or internet culture; it is just culture.

But culture happens in communities, with real people, so it’s not just the billionaires with billions of followers that can bridge the gulf between the virtual and the real. CB Stores is a cash broker come pawn shop in Falmouth, Cornwall. Over the last year, followers have loved seeing their day to day haggles played out on TikTok. So much so that just a few weeks ago, they launched a limited time pop up store in central London, immediately overwhelmed with business, with thousands queuing around the block.

If this is all true, or close enough, then it’s probably time to reconsider the role of social media in marketing. It’s no longer the niche, internet version of your brand, it is your brand. Lived out in public every day, discussed by millions of people around the world, whether we’re involved or not. Social can’t stay the little team tucked in the corner of the marketing department. How our brands are shaped and perceived online must become the responsibility and priority of the entire business.

The social marketer’s new challenge

To be socially valuable, Kim Kardashian is proving that we need to operate IRL, URL and everywhere in between.

So what does that mean for those earning a living in social departments and agencies?

If brands move to a more holistic approach, we’ll need to be ready to integrate, play well with others and invite PR, experiential, UX and customer service teams to become an extension of our world, just as we’ve always been an extension of theirs.