Back in 2018
THE dream brief from the England & Wales Cricket Board (ECB) landed at Craft - Human Intelligence. A mix of research, cricket, innovation and (believe it or not) geography. Fast forward to 2025, and the competition and team brands that we played a part in imagining, designing, making the case for, developing and evaluating have been valued at over £1 billion. In early 2025 a partial sale of the eight team brands generated over £500 million of capital for cricket in this country. We're very proud of having contributed to creating that value. You can see and find out more about the team brands here.
The Hundred was and continues to be a significant strategic investment for the ECB, and for its broadcast partners, BBC and Sky. It aims to appeal to younger, more diverse audiences in terms of gender, socio-economic background and ethnicity. That required repositioning and reframing cricket. But how did it come to be?
The Hundred has been built through thorough audience understanding, a key driver of a revolution in one of England’s most traditional cultural products.
What we were asked to do initially
Cricket in England and Wales had long failed to appeal beyond its loyal-but-aging fanbase. It had been unappealing to many young people, women and those from ethnically diverse groups, being perceived as ‘pale, male and stale,’ exclusive, dull, complicated. Were this situation to have continued, in the medium-to-long term cricket could have ceased to be viable in an increasingly competitive global entertainment landscape. WWE wrestlers had been shown to be more recogniseable than England Test captains.
Part of the ECB's strategy to secure cricket’s future was to launch a revolutionary new competition and global entertainment brand. But quite what would that be?
The Hundred’s brand needed to be built from scratch. The competition required the creation of eight new team identities across seven cities, around which a fanbase could be built – a departure from county-based teams upon which competitions have been based since the 1800s.
Fans needed to be drawn from venue cities and their catchments. For example, the Leeds-based team needed to appeal across a region from Yorkshire to Tyneside, east of the Pennines. What should it be called? Should it have a geographical identifier? If so, what? City? County? Region? Something else? What would the team’s personality be? How would that be executed visually, in brand behaviour, tone of voice?
Each brand required a discrete identity, so teams were differentiated. There would be no sense in the Leeds and Manchester teams reflecting the same ‘Northern’ identity, for example.
The ECB approached Craft to inspire the teams’ creation. Over time the scope grew, with Craft informing the competition masterbrand’s development and delivering a thought-piece on youth culture, informing wider strategy. After its launch, in subsequent seasons we were engaged to evaluate and inform the development of fans’ experiences of The Hundred.
The impact
We can see our work in the competition branding and tone of voice, the team names, their visual identities. The development of a cross platform, 360 degree digital media offer was also informed by Craft’s research.
Ticket sales for the first tournament smashed expectations, and continued to deliver bigger and new audiences. The ECB sold 170,000 tickets before general sale, the fastest rate outside the Cricket World Cup. Particular successes were the high proportion of tickets bought for children, the number of women attending, and the number of attendees who had never been to a cricket match before. The Hundred has been particularly successful in growing interest in women’s cricket and attracting new fans - two of its key strategic objectives.
Commercially, cricket has too-long focused on alcohol brands and financial services for sponsorship. The insight enabled the ECB to secure lucrative commercial partnerships with brands in new categories, including Marvel Comics, KP Snacks, New Era Caps and New Balance.
The Hundred has had and continues to have its detractors, some outwardly hostile. We’ve needed to respond to a sometimes-critical media discourse, given the intense scrutiny and controversy surrounding the tournament. Insight and evidence have been used to respond to emotive narratives. Cricket has a sizeable, complex network of stakeholders – within the ECB, counties, venues, journalists, fans, broadcast partners, commercial partners. Navigating it is challenging. Our insight instilled confidence through a combination of creativity and rigour. We consulted at key stages, embracing the opportunity to involve the ECB’s stakeholders.
How we approached the work
The foundational research comprised three Modules, conducted eight times – once for each venue – drawing participants from the venue city and across its catchment. Given the potentially place-based nature of identity, geography was critical. We worked with the ECB’s sports marketing partner Two Circles, using ticketing and travel data to identify each catchment’s extent and target postcodes. The qualitative and ethnographic stages focused on 16-24-year old non-cricket fans, our key acquisition target.
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148 people, three stages:
Place-based ethnographies – tours of places of interest and significance
A two-week digital ethnography – documenting and illustrating lifestyles, completing thematic tasks, acting as participant-researchers, interviewing friends and family
Follow-up interviews with participants, friends and families – testing hypotheses and co-analysing the ethnographies.
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16-20 participants per area, 3-hour workshops
Mapping, defining and discussing ‘levels of locality’
Responding to and developing creative territories, often with ECB and cricket stakeholders.
We then delivered a creative development workshop for each area, from which emerged a set of brand territories, for testing in Module 3.
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An online survey of 4,474 adults aged 18-55, demographically and geographically representative of each area, with sub-group comparisons possible across the venue city, ‘inner’ and ‘outer’ catchments
Validating the accuracy, appeal and motivating power of attributes identified in earlier Modules
Testing territories against their suitability for describing each geographic level, and as team identities.
Data from all Modules were synthesised into narratives identifying the most fertile territory for brand-building, specifying concepts that could be leveraged to build differentiated brands, plus executional direction – see attached. They guided the briefs used by strategy and creative teams to develop the team brands.
Since then, we have used our remote ethnographic expertise to track fans’ experiences throughout the 2022 and 2023 tournaments - following their mediated engagement with the tournament as well as understanding matchdays and the in-ground experiences.
