The hug of home

Turning a price-led sofa retailer into a brand people love to bring home.

THE HEADSCRATCHER

You’re one of the UK’s biggest sofa retailers, but your growth so far has been about one thing: sales. Big sales. Massive sales. Double discounts on top of sales. It’s created urgency and kept the tills ringing, but a brand can’t survive on clearance offers forever.

All those discounts attract deal-hunters, not loyalists. Customers don’t know what the brand stands for or why they should shop with you outside of sales. So how do you turn a brand built on discounts into something people feel proud to bring into their home?

ScS had been typecast as the deal-driven discounter. We needed to break the discount ceiling. To do that, they needed a clearer purpose, an emotional connection and a reason for customers to choose them that went deeper than a red sale sticker.

Drove brand awareness above category average in six months

Boosted emotional response while sustaining short-term sales

Inspired customers to see ScS differently with its biggest ever brand campaign

Our insight laid the groundwork for developing a new brand purpose: helping create the home you love. Utilising subconscious research we found that consumers say they purchase based on design and trends, but in reality, their subconscious guides them to an emotional connection with a piece of furniture that ultimately becomes as much part of the family, as a pet or relative.

We bought this to life through our creative expression of The Hug of Home, focussing on the feeling of coming back to a home that you love, and that symbiotic relationship of your home loving you back.

From the logo to the design system, website and in-store experience, everything was reimagined to hero that feeling of being welcomed back by a home you love.

We launched this new positioning with ScS’s biggest brand campaign ever. At its heart was a 30-second TV spot that used magical realism to show the restorative embrace of family and furniture when returning home after a tiring day.

The nationwide rollout spanned TV, VOD, radio, OOH and digital. What began as a bold creative leap became a business-wide transformation, repositioning ScS for long-term growth and loyalty.

The launch campaign marked a turning point for ScS. Spontaneous and prompted awareness grew steadily during the six-month run, keeping the brand top of mind and above category average. System1 testing showed a significant lift in emotional response ratings, while maintaining recognition and driving short-term sales.

Trade press described the work as “a home run” and “a seismic step-up in quality for the brand.” Big Furniture Group called it “a whole new direction” for ScS. And internally, it was hailed as the company’s biggest brand campaign to date.

The Hug of Home broke through the discount ceiling, turning ScS from a price-led retailer into a brand people feel proud to bring home.

“ It was imperative for us to move the ScS brand forward… This campaign and new look for the brand will not only help us build on our reputation for value but also bring new audiences to the brand who may not have considered us before. ”

Kyle Rowe - Chief Marketing & Digital Officer, SCS