Every Back-to-School campaign in the GCC this year has a discount attached to it. That part hasn’t changed. What has changed is how hard brands are working to make sure the discount isn’t the whole story.
Splitting the Offer From the Narrative
Max Fashion is the clearest case of a brand treating the discount and the story as two separate jobs, run through two separate channels. The brand is running Buy 1 Get 1 Free on school bags in Saudi Arabia and 40 percent off across the rest of the GCC, numbers that would once have carried an entire campaign on their own. Instead, the value sits underneath a different narrative entirely. “The biggest shift is moving away from generic ‘stock up and save’ messaging toward a trend-led narrative, one that’s built around what kids actually care about, which is looking current to their peers, not just being outfitted for school,” says Haroon Rasheed, Senior Vice President and Head of Marketing at Max Fashion. “GCC retail has become an emotional business now, where brands compete on the quality of the experience and the connection they build, not just on reach or price.”
That distinction between where the offer lives and where the story lives is deliberate. “We let the offer and the story do different jobs, and we place them where each one works hardest,” Haroon explains. “The offer leads wherever someone is close to buying, on the shelf and in-store signage, and equally on the online ads that reach people while they’re already searching or filling a basket. That’s where value closes the sale, and value is what Max Fashion is known for.” The brand’s ‘Back to Cool’ campaign, by contrast, runs across billboards, transit and social, aimed at families who haven’t decided where to shop yet. “Families already trust us for good value, so what we’re adding is the reason to choose Max Fashion: the styles they want, from the brand they know won’t overcharge them.”
Bundling the Value, Then Building an Experience on Top
REDTAG is running a related but more consolidated version of the same idea from the value end of the market: bundling backpacks, footwear, lunch essentials and character tie-ins (Hello Kitty, Spider-Man, Sonic, Frozen) into one destination, with 5-in-1 sets priced at AED 99 and backpacks from AED 59. COO Shehbaz Shaikh frames the collection as a response to a shift inside the household rather than just a price play. “Back-to-School is one of the GCC’s most concentrated family shopping periods, with parents managing several practical needs within a relatively short window. At the same time, children are becoming more involved in choosing the characters, colours and styles they want to carry into the new school year,” he says. “Our focus has been to bring these expectations together through a complete and easy-to-shop collection that combines breadth of choice, practicality and accessible value.”
Notably, REDTAG isn’t stopping at the shelf either. Its “Ready, Set, School!” push extends into malls with a life-size Back-to-School canvas kids can contribute to, a themed photo booth and games, an attempt, as the brand puts it, to make the season “feel more like a fresh beginning than another task on the family calendar.”
Where the Discount Still Does the Talking
The same discount-versus-narrative split shows up outside retail, too — though not everywhere with equal force. du’s Back-to-School push, launched in August, sticks much closer to the traditional discount model: up to 50% off select Power Plans for six months, 60GB of extra data on Prepaid Flexi Yearly Plans, 20% off Home Fibre and 10% off Home Wireless plans online, plus discounts on select devices and accessories. There is no accompanying trend narrative or in-store activation to speak of — the telco frames the push simply as part of “making connectivity more accessible during key back-to-school periods” for students and families across the UAE. It’s a useful control case for the wider trend: when the offer itself (a data allowance, a percentage off a bill) is essentially the product families are shopping for, there’s less pressure to dress it up in a story.
Replacing the Discount With a Bigger Idea
SHOEMART takes the idea furthest, essentially replacing the discount with a different kind of value proposition entirely. Its “School Fee to School Free” scholarship campaign, now in its third year, is putting AED 60,000 toward four AED 15,000 scholarships for UAE students, run in partnership with the Channel 4 Network across English, Arabic, Hindi and Malayalam. President of Shoe Business Dinesh Shahani ties the initiative directly to the financial pressure families are under this season. “Education has the power to open doors and create opportunities that last a lifetime,” Dinesh says. “Through this scholarship campaign, we hope to make a meaningful difference for students and families while encouraging communities to come together in recognising young people with the passion and determination to succeed. As we mark the third year of this initiative, we remain committed to supporting education in ways that create a lasting impact beyond the classroom.”
Borrowing the Logic Into Categories With No Obvious Fit
Renault of AWR Automotive shows the same instinct spreading into a category with no obvious Back-to-School logic at all. Its campaign bundles three years of complimentary service, insurance, ceramic coating, tinting and an easy down payment, repositioning the family car itself as back-to-school infrastructure for the morning school run rather than running a straightforward seasonal discount on a vehicle. “A headline discount is attractive when the car is being considered for purchase, but we wanted to look beyond that single transaction at the costs a family continues to manage after ownership,” says Hussam Baghdadi, COO of AW Rostamani Group. “It is not simply about reducing the price of the car, but about making the overall ownership experience easier and giving families greater peace of mind.”
Baghdadi frames the timing the same way the other brands frame theirs, as a read on what’s actually happening in customers’ lives rather than a reactive sales push. “Back-to-school is a demanding time of year, with daily schedules restarting and customers looking for vehicles that are reliable, spacious and easy to own,” he says. “Rather than creating a different audience narrative specifically for back-to-school, we use the occasion to highlight the qualities of the brand that are naturally relevant at this time of year: practicality, versatility, value and ease of ownership.”
LG Gulf — the Gulf arm of the Korean electronics company LG, a distinct company from the retail conglomerate Landmark Group covered below — takes that logic furthest of all, dropping the student angle from its messaging almost entirely. Its “Summer Survivors” campaign is aimed squarely at parents. “We’ve reimagined back-to-school not as a student-only shopping sprint, but as a family reset, a moment to celebrate parents as they regain their daily structure, enjoy a little peace and quiet, and reclaim time for themselves,” says Mays Al Shawahin, Corporate Marketing Manager at LG Gulf. The offer behind that idea is up to 30% off select Smart TVs and home appliances across the UAE, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Qatar, Bahrain and Oman — positioned, as Al Shawahin puts it, as a way to “reward the home” rather than a straightforward sale. The centrepiece is a custom campaign song built around that same idea. “Instead of a traditional product-heavy ad, we leaned into the emotional rhythm of GCC households,” she says. “The music track humorously celebrates that transition when school resumes, and parents regain their daily peace and structure.”
One Insight, Multiple Brands
Landmark Group is making a version of the same case across three brands under one roof, rather than one. “For Landmark Group, Back-to-School is not about running three separate campaigns; it is about understanding the different needs a family has as they prepare for the new school year,” says Landmark Group’s CMO/VP Marketing. “Centrepoint addresses the core school shopping list, Home Centre helps families create the right environment for learning at home, and Emax reflects the growing role of technology in education and everyday life.” The connecting thread across all three, they add, is meant to be reassurance rather than just a receipt: “We want them to feel that they have made smart choices through products that offer the right balance of quality, functionality, style and value.”
At Babyshop, that plays out as a redefinition of value itself. “For us at Landmark, value goes beyond price,” says Ruban Shanmugarajah, President of Babyshop. “The question is increasingly not simply whether something is affordable, but whether it offers genuine value and will last.” He points to the brand’s school bags as the clearest example of that shift: “Our school bags, for example, come with a two-year warranty, giving parents greater confidence in the durability and value of their purchase.”
Home Centre is chasing a related but distinct shift: the home itself becoming part of the school routine. “We are seeing the home increasingly play a bigger role in the learning journey, which makes the study environment an important part of Back-to-School preparation,” says Atharv Ruparel, General Manager and Head of Marketing at Home Box. Rather than selling households on a dedicated study room, he says the focus this year is “less about creating a traditional ‘study room’ and more about helping families create better learning environments within the spaces they already have.”
Emax, meanwhile, is betting the category has outgrown pencil cases altogether. “Technology has fundamentally changed what being ‘school-ready’ means,” says Pradeep Meena, General Manager and Head of Retail at Emax. This year the brand is leaning into “the growing interest in AI-powered and latest-generation devices,” backed by student and teacher discounts, exchange programmes and flexible payment plans built, he says, to make “technology more accessible.”
Line these examples up and the pattern holds across a genuinely wide spread of categories, from telecom to value fashion to footwear to home, technology and electronics retail to automotive. The discount hasn’t disappeared from GCC Back-to-School marketing this year. It’s just stopped being allowed to carry the campaign on its own. Home Centre put it more bluntly than most in its own campaign line this year: “Your child is going back to school…and so are you.”
