Al-Futtaim has launched its first Group-wide employer brand, The Heart of Tomorrow, with a campaign starring its own employees and shot across more than 15 locations in Dubai, Riyadh and Singapore.

How do you define what the employee experience and the employer brand that expresses it should be for more than 40,000 people, representing over 100 nationalities, working across multiple industries, markets and professions?

That was the challenge behind The Heart of Tomorrow, Al-Futtaim’s newly launched employee value proposition and employer brand the first time the Group has defined a single promise to its employees, and the one creative platform bringing it to life.

Rather than creating a conventional recruitment campaign, Al-Futtaim set out to truly define what characterises Al-Futtaim as an employer and what long-term brand idea can connect more than 90 years of heritage with where the organisation is heading next. The Heart of Tomorrow is much more than a marketing campaign – it is a new framework for the employee experience across Al-Futtaim one intended to shape how HR designs its policies and programmes, how leaders are expected to lead, and what employees can expect from Al-Futtaim from the day they join.

At its centre is a simple thought: while businesses, industries and technology continue to evolve, people remain at the heart of progress.

Finding one authentic truth for a diverse organisation

Al-Futtaim partnered with McCann Synergy, an international employer-brand specialist, to develop the new employer brand and its creative expression. The brief was to find a strategic framework and creative expression that could work across a highly diverse organisation while remaining human, credible and relevant across different markets and audiences.

The process began with research. Employee listening and engagement data was analysed alongside external employee reviews and perceptions. Employee focus groups and senior leadership interviews were conducted; competitor employer brands were benchmarked and key talent personas explored.

One principle guided the process: the employer brand could not present an idealised version of Al-Futtaim that its own employees would not recognise.

The objective was to find the intersection between authenticity and aspiration – capturing what is distinctive about working at Al-Futtaim today while reflecting the organisation it continues to become.

The research identified four areas at the heart of the employee experience: trusted foundations, career-defining possibilities, a diverse and caring community, and the opportunity to shape progress together.

The challenge was to turn those themes into one memorable creative platform.

The Heart of Tomorrow

The result was The Heart of Tomorrow.

The name brings together two sides of Al-Futtaim’s story.

Heart is its people. Across generations, employees have built the businesses, relationships and experiences that have shaped Al-Futtaim.

Tomorrow is its ambition. It reflects an organisation continuing to evolve through technology and AI, new markets, changing customer expectations and new ways of working.

Together, they express the central idea behind the employer brand: the future of the organisation is shaped by the people at its heart.

Putting employees at the centre

That thinking informed one of the projects most important creative decisions: if the employer brand was about Al-Futtaim’s people, those people needed to be the campaign.

There are no professional models in the creative.

The faces appearing across the campaign’s photography, films and creative assets are Al-Futtaim employees. The voice behind the main employer-brand film also comes from within the organisation.

Production took place across more than 15 locations in Dubai, Riyadh and Singapore, capturing employees in very different environments – from automotive showrooms and healthcare clinics to fashion retail and corporate offices.

There is no single Al-Futtaim workplace, profession or employee profile. Rather than smoothing out those differences to create a uniform corporate image, the campaign uses them to tell the story.

The creative challenge was to create one recognisable identity while allowing the breadth of the organisation to come through.

More than a launch campaign

The Heart of Tomorrow has been designed as an ongoing platform rather than a single recruitment or launch campaign. It is designed to function as a strategic framework for how Al-Futtaim needs to develop as an employer as much as a creative one.

It creates a common creative framework that can extend across employer-brand advertising, social content, recruitment marketing, careers channels, internal communications and employee storytelling.

Beyond communications, the platform is designed to inform how the employee experience is delivered day to day and how we approach talent and the promises we make to them. Its four pillars, trusted foundations, career-defining possibilities, a diverse and caring community, and shaping progress together, are intended to guide how HR designs policies and programmes, how leaders are expected to behave, and what employees can expect from Al-Futtaim from the point they join the organisation.

It also needs to speak to very different audiences – from graduates considering their first career move to experienced professionals and senior leaders, as well as existing employees across the Group.

The consistency comes from the platform; the stories beneath it can continue to evolve.

For an organisation of Al-Futtaim’s scale, the numbers tell part of the story: more than 90 years of history, 40,000 people and over 100 nationalities.

But the campaign is ultimately about the individuals behind those numbers.

For a company with more than nine decades behind it, the creative opportunity was not simply to celebrate its history. It was to connect that history with what comes next – and put the people who will shape that future at the centre of the story.

That is The Heart of Tomorrow.