The Hundred starts today, and three of its eight teams are playing under names they did not have last summer. Oval Invincibles are now MI London. Northern Superchargers are now Sunrisers Leeds. Manchester Originals are now Manchester Super Giants. The colours have moved too, each team shifting to match the palette of its new owner's Indian Premier League side.
Creative Review put it plainly this month in its piece on why branding will define the tournament's next phase: for critics, these changes risk diluting local identity for the sake of homogenised, multi-region brand synergy. That is a real tension, and it is worth sitting with, because the same decision lands on founders and marketing leads far outside cricket. At some point most brands are asked whether to keep a name people already recognise or swap it for one that borrows someone else's shine. The Hundred is just the most public version of that question running right now.
The Hundred is changing the names, colours and parent affiliations of several teams to align them with the global cricket brands that now own them. The Sun Group, owners of Sunrisers Hyderabad, took a full stake in the Leeds franchise and renamed it Sunrisers Leeds. Reliance, behind Mumbai Indians, turned Oval Invincibles into MI London. Southern Brave have moved to Delhi Capitals blue and red. The competition is five years old, and its team names were only just starting to mean something to the people who follow them.
This is not a cosmetic refresh. Renaming a team resets the thing a brand spends years building, which is the automatic link in someone's head between a name and a feeling. That link is the asset. Everything else is packaging.
You lose the recognition you have already paid for. When you rename a brand people know, you are not moving their affection to the new name. You are resetting it to zero and hoping something else makes up the difference. Recognition is expensive to build and instant to erase, and a new name inherits none of it by default.
For The Hundred the maths is stark. The competition spent five seasons, considerable marketing budget and a lot of goodwill teaching casual fans that Manchester Originals existed and were theirs. Manchester Super Giants starts that lesson again. A parent like Lucknow Super Giants carries real equity in India, but a family in Manchester who bought a Originals shirt in 2023 does not automatically feel it. They feel that the thing they had learned to support has been renamed after a team on the other side of the world.
There are three specific costs when a recognised name goes:
None of this means the change is wrong. It means the change has a bill, and the bill is usually underestimated because recognition does not show up as a line item until it is gone.
Built equity is recognition you own outright. Borrowed equity is recognition you rent from a bigger brand by attaching your name to it. The Hundred's owners are making a deliberate trade: give up five years of built equity in the local names, and borrow the far larger equity of established IPL franchises instead.
Borrowing can be the right call. A new team with no history has nothing to lose by adopting a name that millions already trust, and a great deal to gain. The problem is when you borrow over the top of built equity you already had. Then you are paying twice: once to erase what you made, and again to import something that does not quite fit the local audience. MI London borrows enormous recognition in Mumbai and almost none on the Oval terraces. Whether that trade pays off depends entirely on who The Hundred is actually for.
This is the calculation Future-Focused Branding (FFB), HRZN's approach to building brands that hold up as a business changes, is designed to make visible before the decision is taken rather than after. The question is never simply 'is the new name stronger'. It is 'stronger for whom, and at what cost to the recognition we already own'.
Renaming works when the equity you are borrowing is genuinely bigger than the equity you are giving up, and when both point at the same audience. Those two conditions have to hold together. A strong new name aimed at the wrong people is still a loss.
Renaming tends to pay off in a few clear situations:
The Hundred's bet only clears that bar if its real target is a global cricket audience rather than the domestic casual fan it originally chased. If the aim is international reach and IPL crossover, borrowing those names is defensible. If the aim is still the British family deciding how to spend a summer evening, the competition has quietly swapped the equity that mattered to them for equity that does not. Both can be true for different teams, which is exactly why a blanket rename is risky. It applies one answer to eight different situations.
A future-focused brand would have separated the parts of the identity that need to travel from the parts that need to stay local. Not every element has to move together. FFB treats a brand as a system with a stable core and adaptable outer layers, so a franchise can signal a new owner without erasing the local name that fans had already adopted.
Two of the five Brand Principles behind that approach are doing the work here. Modularity means the parts of a brand can change independently, so an ownership badge or a colour accent can be added without renaming the whole team. Adaptability means the brand can flex to a new context without breaking what people recognise. A modular system could have kept Northern Superchargers as the name people cheer while introducing the Sunrisers relationship as a visible layer on top. Fans keep their team. Owners get their alignment. The built equity survives the change instead of being written off by it.
Most renaming damage comes from treating a brand as a single switch that is either on or off. The moment you see it as a system with parts that can move at different speeds, you stop having to choose between honouring what people already love and building what the business needs next. You can usually do both.
The Hundred may well be right that its future is global, and for some of its teams borrowing a famous name will prove a shrewd trade. But it has made that trade the expensive way, by renaming brands that fans had only just learned to love, and paying to rebuild recognition it already owned. The lesson for any brand facing the same decision is not 'never rename'. It is 'know exactly what you are writing off before you do'.
If you are weighing a name change and want to understand what recognition you would be keeping and what you would be resetting, that is precisely the sort of thing worth pressure-testing before the announcement rather than after.
Renaming a brand people already know does not transfer their recognition to the new name, it resets it to zero and forces you to rebuild what you had already paid for.
Borrowed equity, the recognition you rent by attaching your name to a bigger brand, only pays off when it is larger than the equity you give up and aimed at the same audience.
A modular brand system lets a franchise signal new ownership without erasing the local name fans have adopted, so built equity survives the change instead of being written off by it.
