To tilt the balance, we went where no brand had gone before.

We created our own counter brand.

Meet Em Khalil, meaning ‘mother of Khalil’, the voice that tackles gender-associated laws and societal stereotypes. Also known as the Yin to Bou Khalil Supermarket's Yang.

With the lack of influencers who champion gender equality, we decided that instead of solely relying on them to spread our message, we would create our very own influencer, Em Khalil.

Online, we launched Em Khalil's Instagram account and ensured that it received the proper attention and following from influencers and bloggers.

On ground, we high-jacked Bou Khalil Supermarket's flagship store signage and gave it to Em Khalil for a day, inviting bloggers and influencers to witness and then spread the news.

And all the PR efforts led to Lebanon's top business publication, Executive Magazine, to invite Em Khalil to headline her own monthly column. Her first article ‘Raising Voices. Raising Women’, sheds light on how women in Lebanon should demand opportunities. It appeared on a double page in both the printed and online versions of the magazine.

Em Khalil's Instagram posts started getting attention from influencers. They quickly started sharing, liking and commenting.

In less than 1 month, Em Khalil had more followers than the #1 NGO for women's rights in Lebanon. And Em Khalil is followed equally by men and women.

After the signage stunt on Women's Equality Day, blogger and media picked up on the story, and both Em Khalil and Women’s Equality Day were in the news for the very first time in Lebanon.

As a result, Em Khalil was invited to write her own monthly column in Lebanon’s most famous business magazine: Executive Magazine. Her first article ‘Raising Voices. Raising Women’, sheds light on how women in Lebanon should demand opportunities.

And this is how a local supermarket chain in Lebanon was the 1st brand to champion women by creating its own counter brand. A trend many international brands adopted 9 months later.

This campaign changed the way the consumer experiences an 83 year old, established, retail brand. A supermarket chain that covers all of Lebanon. By providing the consumer with an experience that changed the way the brand and the topic of gender equality are perceived in the country. To achieve that, we created our own counter brand that became a persona with a voice and an opinion.

We were targeting the whole of Lebanon's population and there first needed to be a conversation on a platform that reaches everyone.

And so, Em Khalil was introduced to the world on her very own Instagram account -@thereal.EmKhalil - with a post for Father's Day, on June 21, 2017. And the conversation began… Post by post, we discussed the dormant inequality that is at the heart of our society. Child marriage, body positivity, women driving, women voting, women in business and even how to pull equal weight as a couple.

Then, on Women’s Equality Day, August 27, 2017, we crossed from the digital world into the real world: We high-jacked the signage of Bou Khalil Supermarket’s flagship store and gave it to Em Khalil for the day.

Couples who came to shop together got a 10% discount on their purchases, to encourage men to pull equal weight in grocery shopping.

Women in Lebanon don’t have equal rights, equal pay or equal laws.

Yet everyone accepts that, even women.

Bou Khalil, being a supermarket, a place where most of Lebanon’s society believes a woman belongs, wanted to change the status quo. And Bou Khalil was the perfect supermarket to do so because its own name carries a layer of gender inequality.

Bou Khalil is a family name, which in Arabic means ‘father of Khalil’.

Yes, there are more than 1000 Lebanese family names built on the ‘Bou’. Like Bou Jaoude, Bou Ghazal, Bou Habib, Bou Nasser to name a few. But in Bou Khalil’s case, in 1935, the family name became the brand and so the entire brand was built on a male figure.

We needed to tilt the balance.