WHEN AFRICAN-AMERICAN singer Rihanna launched her colour cosmetics brand Fenty Beauty in 2016, her intent was to ensure make-up was inclusive and for all. For the longest time make-up brands catered only to white skin. Rihanna disrupted the space by launching 40 shades of foundation across 150 countries, and suddenly, there was something for everyone! Coupled with commercials featuring under-represented and under-served women from myriad cultures, it made brand Rihanna an ambassador of racial inclusivity.

While Rihanna’s singing career would have earned her stardom, it has a shelf life. But Fenty Beauty has ensured her longevity as a brand. After a decade of Fenty Beauty and her inclusive lingerie brand, Savage X Fenty, Rihanna’s brand value has reportedly reached a whopping $2 billion.

On the other hand, Transformers: Age of Extinction star Mark Wahlberg’s claim to fame is not just that his 2014 film earned $1.1 billion globally, or that he profited $47.6 million by selling his 30,500 sq. ft property in Los Angeles — it is his athleisure brand, Municipal, launched in 2019, which is grabbing eyeballs and adding to his long-term celebrity value.

Global celebrity brands are no longer about box-office successes, music album launches, brand endorsements or sporting excellence. Celebrity brand-building has evolved into a well thought-out, savvy, long-term investment in businesses, smart equity deals and much more. While the likes of Rihanna and Kim Kardashian (with her $4-billion shapewear brand, SKIM) enjoy brand valuations that run into billions of dollars, Indian celebrities such as Virat Kohli, Shah Rukh Khan (SRK), Priyanka Chopra Jonas, Ranveer Singh and a host of others are also leaving no stone unturned to build long-term brand equity.

While SRK, who owns IPL team Kolkata Knight Riders (KKR) and content production company Red Chillies, is considered the savviest celebrity business mind, Virat Kohli’s sportswear label One8, his ₹40-crore investment in Agilitas Sports and his strategic investments in plant-based meat brand Blue Tribe and football club FC Goa, prove his commitment towards building a brand value that transcends his cricketing career. And while Ranveer Singh may bask in the glory of the Dhurandhar franchise, his protein-first snacking brand SuperYou, co-founded with entrepreneur Nikunj Biyani in 2024, has already crossed ₹100 crore in revenue.

The maiden Fortune India-Interbrand study of India’s Most Valuable Celebrities ranks Virat Kohli at the top with a valuation of ₹3,542 crore, followed by SRK at No. 2 with ₹3,017 crore, and Priyanka Chopra Jonas at No. 3 with ₹2,507 crore.

Ranveer Singh, at No. 5, with a brand value of ₹2,077 crore, is inarguably the rising star of the celebrity brand valuation table.

While Virat, SRK, Priyanka and Ranveer are the trailblazers, the likes of Hrithik Roshan (whose athleisure brand HRX is clocking over ₹1,000 crore in revenue), Katrina Kaif (whose beauty brand Kay Beauty has crossed ₹130 crore) and Kriti Sanon (her skincare brand, Hyphen, has clocked around ₹100 crore) are also doing their bit to ensure their personal brands outlive their acting careers.

With a brand valuation of ₹1,933 crore, Amitabh Bachchan is a living legend at No. 7, while brand Akshay Kumar, valued at ₹2,064 crore, is immune to box-office hits and misses. His common man imagery makes him the most sought-after celebrity, especially in smaller towns and cities, and No. 6 on the list.

The biggest evolution in recent times is the emergence of a sophisticated ‘equity transfer’ celebrity economy, says Ashish Mishra, MD, Interbrand India. “It is a more informed appreciation of the resonant equities, purposes, lifestyles, and associations that brands are dipping into now. Interestingly, celebs themselves are leveraging their equities to build their own businesses. Another key marker of evolution, interestingly born out of the first one, is a wider and unconventional spectrum of celebs at play. The shift from visibility-driven to equity and meaning-driven is the reason for this transcendence.”

Endorsements to equity

Unilever’s bathing soap brand, Lux, has been using women celebrities in its campaigns since the 1930s. From Hollywood legends such as Elizabeth Taylor and Marilyn Monroe to Bollywood icons Aishwarya Rai Bachchan, Katrina Kaif, and Kareena Kapoor Khan, the brand’s strategy has been to empower women through powerful female faces. Similarly, Pepsi and Coca-Cola have roped in the likes of Amitabh Bachchan, SRK, Aamir Khan, and Akshay Kumar ever since they launched in India in the early nineties. Cricketing legends Kapil Dev and Sachin Tendulkar were the faces of brands such as Boost and Palmolive. The list is endless.

For most brands, signing up a celebrity meant instant recognition and acceptance by consumers. For the celebrity, signing up with a brand was a lucrative source of revenue. “Indian brands discovered the power of celebrities in the 1990s and went on a celebrity binge that lasted over the next 30 years. A study showed that more than 35% of all ads on Indian TV had a celebrity (film or cricket star). Big stars brought instant association and added credibility to the trade,” points out Ambi Parameswaran, advertising industry veteran and founder, Brand-Building.com.

What has really changed today is the nature of celebrity associations. Celebrities are more conscious about the brands they endorse. Purpose is the new mantra. Priyanka Chopra Jonas, for instance, has been the face of UNICEF for over a decade. Similarly, Deepika Padukone is championing mental and emotional well-being.

Today’s celebrities endorse fewer brands, but the value of each deal is higher — anywhere between ₹2.5 crore and ₹10 crore — at least 30-40% more than what it was a decade ago.

“Celebrities aren’t just appearing in ads, they are shaping perceptions. They get involved in social media. They go beyond being the face of a brand, they are becoming a part of the culture of the brand,” explains marketing veteran Alpana Parida, founder and CEO of women’s helmet brand Tvarra. She cites the example of Virat Kohli’s association with Puma (before he partnered with Agilitas to build One8 independently) where he not just endorsed the brand, but also built his own line of athleisure products under the brand name, One8. The ad campaigns of Puma talked about Virat not just as a cricketer, but a youth icon. Virat was not just about Puma shoes, he also assimilated the brand’s culture into his conversations.

The new breed of celebrities, says Manish Porwal, group MD, Alchemist Marketing & Talent Solutions, are more professional than their predecessors. “They want to endorse brands where they can add value. Therefore, the deals are far more complicated today. It’s not just one or two days of ad shoot, it often includes co-created social media posts, too.”

Brands are also becoming careful about bringing celebrities on board. “Using a clearer equity-resonance basis, albeit more intuitively than scientifically, brands now prioritise distinctiveness and trust, turning female superstars like Alia Bhatt into powerful ‘lifestyle moguls’ rather than mere brand ambassadors,” points out Interbrand’s Mishra. “Also, the Bollywood monopoly has been shattered by regional alphas like Allu Arjun, whose fierce affinity commands pan-India success.”

“In a high-risk, cancel-culture era, corporate brands are fleeing to the ‘institutional safety’ and coherence of legacy icons like Mahendra Singh Dhoni, while also paying a premium for celebrities like Deepika Padukone who offer genuine ESG alignment and high responsibility scores. Ultimately, the modern brand seeks a nuanced balance between high-velocity engagement and strategic scarcity to drive both immediate conversion and long-term prestige,” he further explains.

Sandeep Tanwani, chief marketing officer, Pidilite Industries, gives a macro construct of why brands are careful about roping in celebrities. “About 20-25 years ago, brands used to be trusted a lot more. Today, the trust in brands is eroding. When brands used to be trusted, one used to bring in celebrities who had a mass appeal, since the trust already existed. You needed celebrities largely for driving salience.”

Tanwani says there is over-promise and under-delivery at the brand level. “There is a big gap between what brands say and do. That gap has led to trust erosion among consumers. And therefore, what happens is that there is a need to dial up authenticity and trust more than driving salience. Therefore, many a times, brands opt for influencers over celebrities because they bring in a lot more authenticity.”

Influencers do come across as far more authentic, agrees Parida of Tvarra. But celebrities are becoming influencers, too. She talks about the concept of ‘power distance’. “Power distance is a way societies perceive their idols. Sachin Tendulkar, for instance, is considered as god of cricket while Bachchan was god of films. There was a power distance between an ordinary person and the celebrity. Since Bachchan was considered god, you didn’t know what’s going on in his home or how his real life was. That power distance has collapsed,” she explains.

“Today, icons like Virat talk about their daily routine, the vitamins and irons they pump in, their fitness regime. Deepika Padukone openly shares her mental anguish… The role model, today, no longer has godly status.”

Also, most celebrity deals today have a social media clause, too. Unlike earlier, when a classic deal would be two days of a celebrity’s time in a year where he/she would shoot three 30-second ads, in today’s time the duration would be similar, but the celebrity would shoot just one TVC and five-six pieces of social media content.

With a limited career shelf life, celebrities are doing the next best thing to keep their celebrity brand relevant — signing equity deals, especially with challenger brands.

The idea, however, is not new — in 2014, Salman Khan invested in Yatra.com. The actor endorsed the brand and picked up equity in the business.

“Instead of signing an endorsement fee of ₹10 crore, celebrities are asking for equity. They are saying give me a higher equity and I will plough money back into the business,” explains Alchemist’s Porwal.

Kareena Kapoor Khan’s investment in organic vegetable platform Pluckk, Deepika Padukone’s stake in Epigamia and Blue Tokai, and M.S. Dhoni’s in Rage Coffee and more recently, in microdrama platform, Kuku, are a few examples of equity deals. In fact, most celebrities have family offices where they have hired investment bankers to evaluate potential deals.

“The most dramatic change which has happened is that earlier celebrities were trading their time. Now they are trading their persona,” points out Hitesh Gossain, former CEO, Percept. According to him, one of the reasons celebrities are on the lookout for equity deals is because it adds heft to their persona. “Celebrities struggle with the perception of being dumb. The investor as an adjective or a noun lends an intelligent tone.”

Evaluating potential investment opportunities is also an important part of the portfolio of most talent management companies today. “Younger celebrities understand the difference between making money and creating wealth quite well. We have a strong team which looks into business investment opportunities, co-owning business opportunities, investing an actor’s time in a particular business and monetising that time for equity,” explains Uday Gauri Singh, CEO, Dharma Collab Artists Agency.

Building businesses

While most celebs have chosen the equity route to build their brand value, the bigger ones are building businesses from scratch. Be it SRK, Akshay or Priyanka, all of them own film production companies. Owning a film production company is perhaps the natural progression for most actors, but the likes of Ranveer Singh (SuperYou), Hrithik Roshan (HRX), Ranbir Kapoor (ARKS), and Alia Bhatt (Ed-a-Mamma) are building consumer-facing businesses.

Hrithik’s HRX is the first celebrity-led consumer brand, launched in 2012. The actor co-founded the brand with talent management agency Exceed Entertainment. “We embarked on a journey to build something that will be long-lasting. The idea was to have multiple revenue models around a talent. That model that has been successful in the West,” says Afsar Zaidi, founder and CEO, Exceed Entertainment.

While HRX represents the core values of Hrithik’s personality, it has never been only about him. “The early part of Hrithik’s life was full of struggles. He kept going and never gave up. We have brought those elements into the brand, but the brand is also about building a category (athleisure), which didn’t exist in India,” Zaidi explains.

Ranveer’s SuperYou, which he co-founded with Nikunj Biyani, was an idea that came out of post-basketball sessions at the duo’s residential complex in Mumbai. “I had been wanting to build an FMCG food brand which focusses on energy. When I shared the idea with Ranveer, he got excited. At that point he had invested in a few startups, but he hadn’t really co-founded a business.” Ranveer, says Biyani, has been part of the SuperYou journey from day zero. “He’s been part of everything, from deciding on the brand name, to the colour and the design. Even his family has been involved in the tasting of the products.”

Brand Ranveer, according to Biyani, stands for high energy and that is what SuperYou is all about. For an FMCG business to be successful, one needs both market share and mindshare. Ranveer has been instrumental in getting the mindshare for SuperYou.

Building a brand from scratch and being part of the scale-up journey does help a celebrity ensure longevity. Though Virat is the brain behind One8, Smriti Mandhana has also stepped in as co-creator.

“Smriti has been signing a lot of cash-plus-equity deals with brands. She is an investor in Agilitas and is involved in the decision making of their clothes, shoes and other products. She’s involved in the design; she gives her inputs to their production team. Smriti is one of the fittest women athletes also of the Indian team. That’s her pedigree, so, her voice matters,” explains Tuhin Mishra, CEO, Baseline Ventures, which manages Smriti.

More misses than hits India has seen the launch and scale-up of celebrity brands, but failures sadly outnumber success stories. From Anushka Sharma’s Nush, Kriti Sanon’s Ms. Taken to Shahid Kapoor’s SKULT or Deepika Padukone’s 82°E, the list of unsuccessful celebrity brands is quite long.

Exceed’s Zaidi says the reason most celebrity-led consumer brands are not able to make a dent is because the celebrity in most cases is larger than the brand. Also, the motto is to make money and not create value. “Only if you create a brand to create value you will be able to build a long-term, long-lasting business,” Zaidi explains.

He also says celebrity brands need to listen to specialists. “If you are building a jewellery brand, you need to listen to the jeweller. We partnered with Myntra and Cult for HRX. Mukesh Bansal gave us his team to take care of distribution and other nuances where we didn’t have an understanding. We took care of marketing and brand ideology.”

Though HRX represents Hrithik’s characteristic as an individual, Zaidi is clear they will not overuse Hrithik’s image. “We have brand ambassadors for HRX. We have got Tiger Shroff on board. Our female brand ambassador is Tripti Dimri. We don’t want the brand to be only Hrithik-centric.”

According to Biyani, the celebrity is just one piece of the brand puzzle. The most important piece of a brand is the product quality, without which the brand is bound to fail. “A food business is driven by repeat purchases. If you like it, you will buy it again. If you don’t, you will not buy it even if the brand is being sold by a celebrity. There are other pieces such as supply chain and distribution. I feel in most cases people don’t spend enough time focussing on these. They depend too much on the celebrity to drive sales.”

Indian celebrity brands have come a long way. Terms such as ‘long-term brand value’ and ‘longevity’ are not alien to them, but they still have miles to go before they create a proposition that would outlive them. “To elevate Indian celebrity brands into global powerhouses, brand management must pivot from localised endorsement leasing to architecting culturally exportable, IP-owned ecosystems. This requires maximising distinctiveness (category elasticity) and engagement (digital conversion velocity) to scale beyond regional borders, while anchoring the brand in unshakeable coherence and trust to ensure global consumer safety,” says Interbrand’s Mishra.