The next place you see T. Rowe Price’s bighorn sheep logo could be behind home plate at a Baltimore Orioles game. Or on the scoreboard at the team’s Camden Yards stadium. Or on Orioles players’ jerseys.
The Baltimore-based money manager, best known as an active manager of large-cap U.S. equities, announced a multiyear partnership this month with the city’s storied baseball club — newly owned this year by another asset management icon, Carlyle Group’s David M. Rubenstein.
The deal is part of a full court press to refresh the 87-year-old organization’s brand, with the help, in part, of a heavy dose of sports marketing, according to Theresa McLaughlin, T. Rowe’s first head of global marketing.
Research commissioned by T. Rowe showed the firm’s clients — retail, intermediary as well as institutional — sharing a broad interest in sports, making sport-related sponsorships and partnerships an efficient means of “telling our story,” McLaughlin said. And part of that story revolves around the truism that “what got us here” won’t necessarily be what takes T. Rowe to the next level, she said.
For example, if large-cap equities were far and away the focus of the money manager’s growth in decades past, fast-growing business segments such as retirement funds or active ETFs will be more central going forward — facts “we needed to shout a little louder … and find creative ways to tell,” McLaughlin said. The campaign’s broader theme is “the power of curiosity,” a byword for active management, she said.
Following T. Rowe’s sponsorship of the Atlantic Coast Conference basketball tournament earlier this year, which proved highly effective, the tie-up with the Orioles should help T. Rowe “win the hearts and minds of lots of folks” — not just in Baltimore but in other baseball markets where the firm has considerable business, including Toronto, she said. McLaughlin declined to provide financial details of the deal.
