Sunlight is focusing on good deeds to tell a different kind of brand story in a category typically dominated by functional benefits messages.

Working with agency partner Juniper Park\TBWA, the CPG identified examples of charitable people and programs the brand could possibly partner with. This led them to Nancy, a midtown Toronto laundromat operator featured in a new spot, who raised $1,000 to help those less fortunate struggling to clean their clothes.

“Few categories are as steeped in conventions, and Sunlight had an appetite to break through the clutter to really connect with their customers on an emotional level,” says Bill Chamness, VP of strategy at Juniper Park\TBWA. The client wanted to go a different way from simply telling a story about “winning on functional benefits,” he says, and tell one about showing the difference everyday people can make in their communities.

Chamness tells strategy viewers have been conditioned to expect to be taken inside a washing machine and to watch lasers zap out stains, and typically, to be told how and why something works. And he says that it got lucky in connecting with Nancy, whose story was more compelling: a woman moved to action mid-pandemic by people who had fallen on hard times.

As a small business owner who is helping people in her community shine, the brand says Nancy’s story was the perfect fit with its corporate values, as well as its laundry product, and the company is supporting her efforts to continue the initiative.

Henkel, the maker of Sunlight laundry detergent, is promising to lend a hand to 10 more deserving people. In a contest hosted by Global TV’s The Morning Show, Sunlight called on viewers to nominate deserving people, and is will be providing funds to help recipients make a bigger impact in the communities they serve.

The campaign is running across Canada on TV, digital, social and shopper, aimed at “busy moms, the CEO of the household who is managing purchasing and budgeting,” Chamness says. It will be live until Oct. 15, though Sunlight will be finding ways to celebrate winners into 2024. UM is handling the buy.

This is Juniper Park\TBWA’s second major campaign for the CPG, the first of which dialed up the emotional storytelling, urging viewers to not sweat the small stuff and focusing on a Nigerian family in Toronto trying to establish roots in a new country, culminating in the father landing a new job.