Rihanna Named Most Marketable Celebrity

Of all big-name celebrities–including actors, athletes, musicians and others–Rihanna is the most marketable, according to new data from The NPD Group.

April 6, 2018

Pop singer found to have fans with the most 'distinctive brand preferences.'

NPD’s BrandLink database, which represents responses from 92,000 consumer surveys, identified the brand preferences of fans to help marketers identify the celebrities with which brand users are most likely to engage.

According to NPD, a celebrity is considered to be a strong endorsement opportunity for a brand if the fans of that celebrity are at least 50 percent more likely to use the brand. The endorsement score shown in the chart reflects the relative marketability of big-name celebrities, based on the total number of brands for whom they would be a strong endorser.

Other celebrities to make the list include Beyoncé, Ne-Yo, Usher and Wiz Khalifa.

Rihanna’s index score of 367 means that she has almost 3.7 times as many strong brand endorsement opportunities as the average big-name celebrity. One brand that helped drive Rihanna to the top of

the list was Jeep, meaning that her fans show a distinct preference for Jeep. For example, despite similar music and fan bases to Beyoncé–the second most marketable celebrity–BrandLink shows Rihanna’s fans are more likely to choose Jeep.

“CMOs and CFOs have long asked for better data to help inform their expensive sponsorship decisions. We can now prove what has been suspected when making expensive sponsorship decisions–that celebrities are media properties in their own right, with audiences that have nuanced brand preferences,” says Barbara Zack, vice president, The NPD Group. “In the same way that every sitcom is not equally valuable to a particular brand, neither is every celebrity equally valuable to a particular brand.”