When it comes to athlete partnerships, New Balance aims for quality over quantity.
“We take an approach of ‘fewer, bigger, better’ when we’re signing partnerships,” said Naveen Lokesh, New Balance’s head of global sports marketing for basketball and football, during a session at the 2024 CEO Summit hosted by The Wharton School’s Baker Retailing Center and RLC Global Forum on Tuesday. “We want to sign fewer partnerships and market them in a bigger way by telling the best stories.”
When it came to signing its first women’s basketball player, Cameron Brink, New Balance spent two years watching the athlete play — and did a deep analysis into how her social media following could be additive to the brand’s appeal among Gen Z and Gen Alpha consumers. This due diligence paid off once New Balance started to see the impact of the partnership in real time.
“Our fourth most engaging post of our social-owned platforms was when Cameron Brink got drafted into the WNBA back in May,” Lokesh said. “And those numbers were easy numbers to share within our organization to say ‘this is working.'”
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New Balance also did A/B product testing that found a 22 percent lift in engagement when a post featured Cameron Brink. When adding the WNBA marks, posts saw another 10 percent lift in engagement. Internally, New Balance’s product teams have also benefitted from being able to get Brink’s input on product design. And retail partners like Foot Locker have been excited about having more WNBA representation from the brands they work with.
“That was a huge validation for us and a mix of ROIs,” Lokesh said.
A year after signing its deal with Brink, New Balance deepened its partnership with the WNBA this past July and signed a multiyear deal that establishes the brand as the official partner of the league. This sequence of events — from specific athlete partnership to broader deal with a league — highlights the New Balance’s “athlete first” approach to entering a sport, as was the case with the signing of Coco Gauff, New Balance’s first female partner in the tennis space.
“Once we find [the athlete] as our foundation, we look to the leagues as amplification tools,” Lokesh said, adding that New Balance plans to enter more league partnerships in the future, building off its athlete stories.
“For New Balance, it’s really about telling authentic stories in order to reach our new consumer base,” he said.
