Skims is an underwear, loungewear and shapewear brand targeting young women in Generation Z, the tagline of Skims is “Solutions for Every Body”, emphasizing the technical effectiveness of their products. https://skims.com/pages/about The brand uses diverse models with different skin colors and body shapes, portraying a visual and brand image that broadens the definition of shapewear and the boundaries of the dress code.
When we talk about Skims, we must discuss the influence of its founder, Kim Kardashian, on the value of the brand. As a public celebrity with over 100 million followers, Kim Kardashian has amplified the network and community marketing and celebrity marketing through social media, which further establishes Skims as an active brand with a buzz on the internet, Skims already has 5.59 million followers on Instagram.
In interactive social media, we can view lots of user-generated content about Skims, ‘Kim is magical’ is one of the captions that impresses me. Take TikTok as an example, the main content of Skims can be classified into review (evaluation), and dress show (mostly positive shaping effect). The most frequent hashtags include ‘Tryon haul’, ‘body suits’, and ‘Skims before and after’, which lead to threads or campaigns, such as boyfriends’ reactions to wearing Skims. In addition, the associated search ‘Skims wear on a normal person’, ‘mid-size’ etc. all show the brand’s tolerance for body shape, reflecting the concern of consumers with different body types for its shaping effect. These thematic short videos make the brand concept widely spread and break the fixed circle.
User-generated content of the non-professional practice has created a tremendous reference value for branding, with its internet buzz radiating across multiple circles of women, assisting brands in Content integration. Many women have shown videos on social media of the comparisons of wearing Skims, visualizing the experience for the brand’s consumers. It is interesting to note that a girl posted on TikTok claimed that she wore Skims shapewear during her bullet and controlled the amount of bleeding, and this video went viral on TikTok and even multiplatform, achieving further positive marketing for Skims’ shaping effects.
User-generated content is a way of expressing users’ own opinions or attitudes and gaining acceptance from the interest relationship’s community, such social currencies are constantly being overlapped on social media and attracting commercial enterprises, advertisers and media giants. I think it’s quite difficult for average grassroots UGC creators to make financial profits from it, and the inflation of user-generated content gives people an illusion of a democratization of media production, which can be interpreted as the democratization of culture. Commercial brands and media giants attempt to take control of this non-professional content which creates strong promotional value and makes it institutionalized and monetized. This is the reason why many of the UGCs with lots of likes and reposts on social media are influencers with a fan base, or Multi-Channel Network organizations with professional content production capabilities and celebrity incubation systems. While people are involved in producing or disseminating branded user-generated content, consumers are still passive even if they initially search for a product out of curiosity and evaluation. Both brands and media platforms are trying to convert the user’s high click rates on the content into actual purchasing power, and it is probably hard to deny that algorithmic technology has intervened in the UGC, for example, distributing UGC content to consumers of potential interest to them.
User-generated content is a kind of grassroots carnival, the content market is occupied by countless creators, but most resources in the content market are controlled by the brands together with the platform, they are also the biggest beneficiaries of UGC.