The gold rush for celebrity-founded consumer brands is in full swing.
And new celebrity-backed brands come to market every day, most recently brands like Stiller's Soda by Ben Stiller, BERO by Tom Holland, and Papatui by Dwayne "The Rock" Johnson to name just a few.
While a side gig in consumer goods is proving to be a lucrative choice for many celebrities - or even a great new full time job for famous faces like Rihanna (we'll be waiting for that next album forever), those of us in CPG know how hard it can be to succeed on shelf.
Watch our full discussion with Jackie Widmann, SVP of Marketing & Commercial at BERO, and Lucas Ballasy, CEO at Barrel, to get all the insights you need to build a celebrity brand that drives trial and builds long-term loyalty.
Highlight surveyed 1,296 members of our nationwide panel in late October 2025 to ask for their quantitative and qualitative feedback on topics related to celebrity-backed consumer brands.
Which of the following brands have you bought products from in the past 6 months?
Given the choice of 19 recently launched celebrity brands, the top five most popular answers were:
Which of the following brands would you like to try, but haven’t yet?
Given the choice of the same 19 brands, we wondered what brands they have the most interest in trying. The top five most popular answers were:
When we used the Highlight platform to segment those results by gender, the results looked a little different:
Just men:
What kind of impact does a famous face have on consumer reactions and purchase behaviors? We asked respondents: If you see a brand is backed by a celebrity you like, which of the following do you believe?
Celebrities aren't just focused on drinks and makeup. They're diving into categories that span the whole CPG and retail space. We wondered, where are consumers most interested in purchasing a celebrity-backed brand?
So we asked: In what category do you feel like celebrity backing is most likely to influence you to purchase or try a new product?
To dive even deeper, we added a qualitative component to our survey to give respondents the opportunity to elaborate on their thoughts and opinions that may not have been captured in previous quantitative questions. This was especially enlightening, as many respondents specifically named celebrity-backed brands they admire, and why:
Highlight AI made our analysis of the respondent verbatims much quicker and easier by summarizing the open-ended responses, indicating positive and negative sentiment among those responses, and highlighting key words used most often in these responses.
One sentiment came through loud and clear from the open-end responses we received in this survey: Consumers value authenticity. Simply endorsing a product you have no connection to or no hand in building could drive trial, but in order to build a brand with on-shelf staying power, celebrities should build a brand that reflects their true experience, and create a high-quality product that lives up to consumer wants and needs.
See some sample responses for a taste of what our Highlighters (i.e., members of our nationwide panel) said:
"People want products that actually work but they also love to see true passion."
"Try the product, test the product, use the product yourself. Understand all aspects and make sure it's something you would use yourself."
"Be honest and genuine. Do market research first!"
Find more consumer insights from the Highlight platform: