This case is about one initiative we don’t mind all competing brands and agencies doing/emulating/stealing/taking on as their own – as it’ll make our world a little better than it is today. And if that happens, it’ll make the Middle East region a little better than it is today.

With most brands in the retail category (and especially, in the furniture retail category) focused on product and selling (price-offs, discounts, promotions), we strategically doubled down on emotional persuasion and social good for Home Centre, a leading home furniture retailer in the Middle East.

Using its brand belief that ‘everyone deserves a home they love’, we persuaded Home Centre to address an untapped and unspoken tension in the region: the Middle East is a region where orphaned children abound, but it is also a region where adoption is wrongly considered anti-religion and illegal.

This case describes how a Home Centre challenged the religious and cultural taboo around adoption in the Middle East and created the first initiative to help the increasing number of orphaned children in the region, find a home. Truth is, “Just because they are not born our own, doesn’t mean we can’t give them a home”.

With “The Homecoming” initiative, we enabled Home Centre to become the first brand to propagate and support adoption among Arabs and Muslims.

First, we had to break the taboo and disarm people into seeing the good they’d do to a child’s life by adopting the child.

We launched the initiative with a short narrative story that travelled the region and earned attention towards the topic of adoption.

As the film went viral across social and digital platforms creating a negative backlash, we countered the expected backlash through influential voices joining us. This enabled us to tackle negativity across news, media, social media and religious platforms.

Then, we had to be the ally to those who wanted to adopt by giving them access to knowledge, organisations and emotional support they needed to make the process of adoption known, easier and effective.

We helped people adopt beyond creating the much-needed awareness about the need to adopt by transforming the brand’s digital hub, the Home Centre’s website, from just promoting products to also promoting adoption.

The initiative, through a trans-media approach, integrated mediums most relevant to our audiences to challenge the cultural taboo of adoption.

In becoming the first brand to address the topic of adoption in the Middle East region, Home Centre earned reputation, respect and also, witnessed unintended business growth.

Importantly as “The Homecoming” initiative found its way into people’s homes and hearts, we helped over 7,600 orphaned children get adopted into homes they’d call their own.