Making money doesn’t have to stop when you drop dead ... if you’re a celebrity. In fact, the earning power of pop idols and movie stars can rapidly increase when they’re six feet under as advertisers scramble to sign them up to front advertising campaigns.

The deal struck by Bob Marley’s family this week to license the reggae legend’s image to the world’s first cannabis product has revealed the marketeer’s latest money-spinning ruse: buying up the image rights to dead celebrities.

As the Marley deal shows, mortality is no barrier to success. In 2014 Michael Jackson topped the list of deceased celebrity windfalls after his estate earned $140m (£90m) including takings from album sales and two stage shows, according to Forbes magazine, compared with the estimated $14m generated by each member of One Direction – a boy band at their youthful peak.

Even Albert Einstein is out-earning some A-list figures, with his name making sales of $11m in 2014 thanks to posters, T-shirts and his own line of tablets.

The growing trend for nostalgia has caused a sharp rise in the value of deceased celebrities’ brands for product promotions, according to several marketing and branding experts.

“It’s massive business,” said Kelvyn Gardner, UK managing director of the Licensing Industry Merchandisers’ Association (LIMA) the global trade body for rights licensing. “In the US there are whole agencies that have grown up to represent deceased celebrities, and they’ve made substantial business doing it.

“In some cases their whole portfolio of rights consist of dead people and dead brands. At the moment it [branding] is all about nostalgia for different eras and movie and pop stars from the past encapsulate that.

“Stuff from the past is a very tempting gold mine to go to when [advertisers] are looking for future success.”

Several recent blockbuster advertising campaigns have included well known figures from yesteryear, including a computer-generated Audrey Hepburn in Galaxy chocolate adverts, Marilyn Monroe promoting Chanel No5, Steve McQueen in Porsche commercials and Gene Kelly singing in the rain for Volkswagen.

PR and branding expert Mark Borkowski said the trend for resurrecting celebrities has been closely followed by trademark and intellectual property experts and their lawyers seeking to cash in. “It is a potentially huge area for people sitting on estates,” he said. “You’ve got to do some smart thinking to see which brands resonate with the deceased, but if it works it can be massive.”

Borkowski said Marley’s tie up with private equity firm Privateer Holdings to create the Marley Natural cannabis range was “utter genius”. “From a branding point of view there couldn’t be a better fit between product and celebrity than cannabis and Marley,” he said.

Gennaro Castaldo of the BPI, which represents the UK record industry, said: “The very act of dying tragically young or with great potential that goes unfulfilled can confer a powerful iconic status on an artist, particularly if they already had a growing and devoted cult following around the world.”

The chances of a Tiger Woods-style brand meltdown are also less likely when you are dead. Castaldo adds: “Somewhat ironically, a potential by-product of the artist no longer being around any more is that they can’t mess up their life and attract the kind of bad publicity that can sometimes destroy a career, although bad publicity can sometimes also feed the notoriety that can also lead to posthumous success.”

Castaldo said artists of cultural significance can become major brands, and companies spring into action in an attempt to sign up the rights to the brand almost as soon the artist dies – if not by legal agreement beforehand.

“Increasingly the rights to this brand identity are owned and marketed by the artist’s estate or even major corporations that look to make a return on their investments by producing a wide range of merchandising and products that can stretch way beyond the artist’s original recordings,” Castaldo added.

The Marley deal will swell the coffers of the already very profitable Marley estate which extends to Marley branded headphones, clothing, cigarette papers, One Love children’s dolls, and a range of Marley’s Mellow Mood drinks. Together with sales of his records, Marley’s estate made $20m (£12.8m) last year, according to Forbes magazine.

While Marley’s estate made a lot of money, the earnings pale in comparison to Michael Jackson who topped the rather ghoulish Forbes list of the world’s highest earning famous dead people making $140m last year.

Jackson, who claimed to be “desperately broke” shortly before his death in 2009, has been generating income for his estate from two posthumously-released albums, including this year’s Xscape, which became Jackson’s 10th UK number one album, his back catalogue and a 50% stake in a venture that owns the publishing rights to hit tracks by the Beatles, Elvis and Eminem.

It’s not just music. He has appeared via hologram in two Cirque du Soleil shows: The Immortal World Tour – one of the top 10 biggest grossing tours of all time – and One, a permanent performance in Las Vegas. His estate has earned a total of $700m since his death, according to Michael Jackson Inc, a book with the strapline “The rise, fall and rebirth of a billion-dollar empire”.

Jackson – whose beneficiaries are his 84-year-old mother Katherine and children Prince, Paris and Blanket – is not the only celebrity to see his earning power soar after passing to the other side.

Elvis Presley’s estate is said to have made $55m last year, a figure expected to be higher next year when the firm that bought rights to his brand (for a reported $125m) opens its own hologram Elvis show in Vegas. There’s even talk that hologram Elvis may jam with hologram Jackson.

Graceland, Elvis’s former Memphis home, which draws in 600,000 visitors a year, making it the second most-visited private home in the US after the White House, is also going on the road to make even more money. Elvis at the O2, an exhibition including a virtual tour of the Memphis mansion where Presley died in his bathroom in 1977 – opens at the O2 in Greenwich, London, on 12 December.

Top-earning dead people

1. Michael Jackson; $140m; Died 25/6/09, aged 50

2. Elvis Presley; $55m; 16 August 1977; 42

3. Charles Schulz (creator of the Peanuts comic strip); $40m; 12 Feb 2000; 77

4. Elizabeth Taylor; $25m; 23 March 2011; 79

5. Bob Marley; $20m; 11 May 1981; 36

6. Marilyn Monroe; $17m; 5 Aug 1962; 36

7. John Lennon; $12m; 8 Dec 1980; 40

8. Albert Einstein; $11m; 18 April 1955; 76

9. = Theodor Seuss Geisel (aka Dr Seuss, author of The Cat in the Hat books); $9m; 24 Sept 1991; 87

9. = Bruce Lee; $9m; 7 July 1973; 32

9. = Steve McQueen; $9m; 30 Nov 1980; 50

9. = Bettie Page (“Queen of Pinups” model); $9m; 11 Dec 2008; 85