For the brands maintained by Unilever, the consumer product giant, advertising is taking a new tack: Focus on emotion, rather than functionality. Especially when children are involved, the functional benefits often are not the primary purchase determinant. So while Ragu continues to offer two servings of vegetables in every half-cup of sauce, its televised and online advertising centers instead on two key human emotional needs: the need for comfort and the need to laugh.
These drives get closely related when advertising spots remind parents of just how 
tough it is to be a child. One displays a child getting his face wiped by his mother’s spit-laden thumb. Another highlights a suspicious child, wonderings why her father keeps watching her, and why her hamster looks so much more perky—and different in color—than it did yesterday. The children’s unhappy, untrusting, and resigned faces clearly express just what a struggle a day of childhood can be—and how much of that is their parents’ fault.
The solution is Ragu, according to the campaign’s tagline: “Give them Ragu; they’ve been through enough.” Because every child has his or her own everyday struggles, the televised campaign is being paired with online and mobile functionalities that allow parents to upload videos of their children’s rough days. Another online campaign takes parents’ efforts to get their children to eat a nutritious meal to absurd extremes, such as showing a mother wearing pasta braids dipped in Ragu.
But in all these cases, the focus remains on children. In turn, the advertisements have largely sparked a chuckle of recognition among consumers. However, one of the “Long Day of Childhood” creations raised controversy as well. In it, a young boy leaves his parents’ room, a look of shock and horror on his face. A jingle narrates, “Parents in bed, but it’s only 8:00. That’s why they taught you that you should always knock.” Complaints about the innuendo of this particular advertisement followed quickly, but perhaps it should not have come as too much of a surprise. Unilever also markets Axe body spray, a product whose racy advertising continues to shock, surprise, and amuse various segments of consumers.
Source: Elizabeth Olsen, “Not Every Bad Day Needs to End with Ice Cream,” The New York Times, August 14, 2012.
Grewal Levy Marketing News 
It is interesting to see how advertisements have moved from functionality to emotion. Many new advertisements don’t reveal the product until the very end of the commercials, often they do not have anything to do with the product itself. I wonder if this actually works in terms of attracting the consumers because sometimes the whole point of advertisements is to get the name and purpose of the product known to a large base of customers. Emotion can connect to a customer, but if the customer doesn’t know what the product does or offers in terms of functionality, it is hard to predict whether or not the product is suitable for them. This is definitely a different way of advertising and I’d be curious to see how these types of advertisements compare to the success of the traditional functionality advertisements.
Ragu is being very smart in how it is marketing to parents about how Ragu can make any bad day in a child’s life better by causing a child to have comfort and the ability to laugh. Ragu is marketing to parents by making them feel sorry for children who have a bad day and thus parents want to make their children happy, so they will buy Ragu. What I find interesting, and somewhat disturbing, though is that Ragu uses extreme examples of what a bad day for a child would be which I feel are unnecessary. I also find it interesting that Ragu is not emphasizing the fact that it is healthy which I would think would make parents want to purchase Ragu even more. But, perhaps this is because the focus is on cheering children up with Ragu, and being healthy typically is not something that cheers a child up.