Los Angeles Times - CA,USA - Until someone dialed 911 on Feb. 8 to report a disturbance in Hancock Park, the pop star Rihanna and her R&B-singer boyfriend, Chris Brown, enjoyed relatively wholesome reputations. Attractive and talented, the couple were known as sexy but not oversexed, fun-loving but not reckless. The two seemed unlikely to be involved in anything more shocking than an all-night dance party.

That image opened the door to a host of commercial endorsements. Brown appeared in ads for Doublemint gum and milk while Rihanna hawked more than a dozen products, including Nike sportswear, Totes umbrellas, Venus razors and Fuze beverages.

But then came the

New York Times - United States - EARLY last year, marketing executives at Totes Isotoner, a Cincinnati company that had spent the previous 30 years churning out a reliable lineup of humble umbrellas, crowded around a computer and listened to a teenage singer from Barbados named Rihanna breeze through a tune titled, appropriately, “Umbrella.”

The song, not yet released, had commercial, jingle-ready lyrics and a stick-in-your-head hook: “You can stand under my umbrella, ella, ella, eh, eh, eh.” Totes, which hadn’t deployed celebrity endorsements since the former N.F.L. quarterback Dan Marino hawked its gloves more than a decade earlier, was smitten. “Umbrella” became a corporate rallying cry, with

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