From Red Carpet to Bar Cart: The Celebrity Alcohol Boom

With the holiday season in full swing, the drinks are flowing and our pours are getting heavier. Plenty of gifting opportunities lie ahead, with many guests offering up a bottle of alcohol to gracious hosts. It seems that every week a new liquor or canned beverage joins the market and one trend that’s showing no signs of stopping is celeb-backed brands. We decided to put celebrity alcohol brands to the test to see what consumers really think of the familiar faces behind these bottles.

Distilling the ‘Why’ behind the Celebrity Alcohol Boom

Celebrity-backed brands aren’t new. Hollywood icon Paul Newman and his friend A.E. Hotchner decided to give friends homemade dressing in old wine bottles for the holidays in the 1980s. Today, Newman’s Own still sells salad dressing and other food products, proving that some famous faces can create lasting brands.

Over the last decade, the market has seen an influx of new celebrity alcohol brands. At the same time, the number of people who say they drink has decreased. New product development in the category is growing while fewer people are regularly consuming alcohol. Does this pattern mean disaster for new drinks? After all, the vast majority of new innovations fail.

While not the first, one of the biggest successes in the space to date has been George Clooney and his Casamigos Tequila. It was founded in 2013 and just four years later was sold in a deal that valued the brand up to $1 billion. With dollar signs in their eyes, many others have wisely followed suit to strike it big in the booze world.

Mainstream celebrities, including athletes, actors and musicians, are widely known thanks to the large stages their professions give them access to. This can make them perfect for a brand ambassador role. Many consumers admire celebrities and consuming their brands is one way to emulate their lifestyle and feel a closer connection to their idols.

At System1, we emphasize that emotion drives brands forward—the more people feel, the more they buy. The alcoholic beverage industry is highly profitable despite nearly 40% of the population abstaining from alcohol. Statista predicts that by 2025, the global market size will exceed $2.2 trillion, making it an attractive investment for celebrities, especially those looking to diversify their portfolios. For some, alcohol brands are another creative outlet, an opportunity to make their mark in a unique way.

Testing the Stars

With more than 150 celebrity alcohol brands available, we tested a handful of them using our Test Your Innovation platform, which predicts a product’s market success based on consumers’ emotional responses. Our bar cart includes some newer launches as well as a few that have been on shelves for years, a mix of different spirits and wine from actors, musicians and influencers. These include:

• Wild Turkey Longbranch Bourbon – Matthew McConaughey
• 19 Crimes Cali Wine – Snoop Dogg
• Teremana Tequila – Dwayne ‘The Rock’ Johnson
• Dos Hombres Mezcal – Brian Cranston and Aaron Paul
• SirDavis Whisky – Beyoncé
• Betty Booze – Blake Lively
• 818 Tequila – Kendall Jenner
• Sauza 901 Tequila – Justin Timberlake

How Test Your Innovation Works

Before diving into the results, here’s a bit about the ideas testing platform:

Test Your Innovation provides brands with insights from real consumers, allowing them to refine their ideas before launch. These may be new product developments, taglines, packaging, logos and more.

The Star Rating system measures predicted market potential on a 1.0 to 5.9-Star scale, based on:

• Emotional Pull: Using our FaceTrace® tool to gauge emotional resonance and consumer connection.
• Share Trading: Assessing willingness to “buy” or “sell” the product idea, offering insights into consumer behavior.
• Decision Speed: Evaluating how quickly and intuitively consumers engage with the idea. Faster engagement is positively weighted, while slower engagement is penalized.

The Right Blend: What Makes or Breaks Celebrity Alcohol Brands?

There are several factors that impact celebrity-owned alcohol brands, including:

• Reputation

When a celebrity launches a brand, their reputation becomes intertwined with the product. Consumers start associating the celebrity’s image with the brand’s identity. Celebrities are “hired devices,” whether they are representing their own brand or being compensated as the face of a brand. Unlike fictional characters, celebrities bring their established followings and emotional appeal, adding a cool factor to the brand. For the most part, this is positive, but the major caveat is when things head south for the celeb.

Strong awareness can be a double-edged sword for public figures. Consumers prefer brands that reflect their values and celebrities, being human, can make mistakes that impact their reputation and business ventures. A public misstep can harm the brand and the bottles may not fly off the shelf like they used to. This is why we often recommend fluent devices, recurring brand-owned characters, which don’t risk tabloid scandals. More on that here.

• Connection to Alcohol

To gain consumer trust, interest and loyalty, it’s important for celebrities to showcase their knowledge and expertise in the space. A celebrity with no clear connection to alcohol is not as likely to resonate with consumers. In our testing, we came across many responses related to trust based on a celebrity’s perceived expertise. For example, 42% of participants agreed with the statement “I trust Matthew McConaughey to know about good bourbon.” Not only does Matthew’s personality and for lack of a better word, his “brand,” jive well with bourbon, but more importantly, his Texan upbringing means the man knows his bourbon.

Meanwhile, 35% of Test Your Innovation respondents saw Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson’s connection to tequila as a significant advantage. Teremana is a passion project born from his love of tequila that he’s consumed over the years.

This desire for familiarity and a clear connection to the celebrity can partially be explained by the 80/20 rule that helps new innovations achieve success. A new idea should be 80% familiar and 20% new so that it doesn’t feel like too much of a departure from what people are accustomed to, but also offers a novel and exciting update on what’s already in the market.

Thankfully, innovation testing can help uncover any watch-outs about reputation and whether a celebrity is strongly associated with a particular product category, in this case alcohol.

Cheers to your next Great Innovation

A number of celebrity alcohol brands are thriving because they strike the right balance between reputation and genuine connection. They tap into our emotions, leveraging star power to evoke surprise and happiness. They’re the perfect blend of familiarity and innovation. So, this holiday season, whether you’re gifting or enjoying a drink, raise a glass to the stars behind the spirits.

With a database of over 54,000 innovations to benchmark against, Test Your Innovation empowers brands to Create with Confidence. Use Test Your Innovation to predict your winner from an early stage and finetune it throughout the innovation process.