Citizen Kane – value (not values)

How can Citizen Kane help us uncover consumer value, with our marketing campaigns?  Why should we, and how have brands like Dove, Snickers and Levis done it?

Everything I Know about Advertising I Learnt from the Movies: #2

“Rosebud.” 

It’s the famous first line in the movie Citizen Kane. Made in 1941, directed by and starring Orson Welles, it is considered by many critics to be the greatest film ever made.

Welles plays Charles Foster Kane, a fabulously wealthy and powerful man, who lives in gilded splendour, surrounded by opulent riches, able to buy anything and anybody he wants. And, as one critic puts it: “Kane would likely be diagnosed with Narcissistic Personality Disorder, brought on by early childhood trauma and an obsessive desire to leave his mark on the world, no matter what the cost.”

Anyway, he dies sad, lonely, and largely forgotten. On his deathbed, as well as being the first line in the movie, “rosebud” is also his last.

His story, told in flashback, is a newspaper reporter’s quest to find its meaning: trawling back through Kane’s life, as the reporter is convinced that “rosebud” is the key to unlocking the essence of the man. His truth.

It's kind of what we need to do with advertising. In order to connect to our audience of consumers, we need to unlock their essence, their measure. Their truth. What makes them tick. Only then can we communicate a meaningful message about how a brand can add value to their lives. But it usually takes a bit of legwork, and the client wants it on Thursday.

As the great strategist Alex M H Smith says, we simply need to: “sell something people want that they can’t get anywhere else.” Or, as the preeminent strategic thinkers of their generation, the Spice Girls, put it: “So tell me what you want, what you really, really want.” 

But, with so much choice and relative wealth, surely most western consumers – like Kane – can get pretty much anything and everything they want, whenever they want, right? And with every product category stuffed with competing brands, catering for every conceivable need, with very little differentiation from one another, how can we hope to get them to want ours?

Well, because it’s human nature to always want something more. The grass is always greener. There is always something missing: an itch that you can’t seem to scratch. Our job is first to find it. Then make consumers feel it, and then feel that they can’t scratch it anywhere else. Like Jehovah’s witnesses try to do on your doorstep, only better.

So, what itches can say brands like Dove, Snickers, and Levi’s scratch that Olay, Kit Kat, and Wrangler can’t? I mean really?

What did Dove discover about what women want in their Real Beauty campaign? That they want to feel beautiful, for sure, but more importantly, that traditional cosmetic/skin care advertising often has the opposite effect. Represented by airbrushed supermodels, it actually makes beauty seem unattainable. Dove told women that they are beautiful already, by showing the beauty of real women. What women wanted was confidence, when everybody else was selling doubt.

And what about Snickers? What makes it so different from any other chocolate bar? Apart from the nuts that is. What did Snickers discover that people needed, that they felt they might not be getting somewhere else? To boost their blood sugar levels (and mood) between meals. Sure, everybody knows that any chocolate bar could do that (and that a banana will do it a lot more healthily). But, before the brilliant: “You’re not you when you’re hungry” campaign, nobody really claimed it. Snickers now own it.

Going back way further, with Levi’s in the 1980s. They were just a regular American jeans brand, with lacklustre sales. But they had rich heritage, representing a nostalgic vision of the past, especially the 1950s and 1960s: the postwar era of rock n roll, rebellion, and free love. What’s not to like? Or want. A yearning for a kind of perceived ‘lost innocence,’ that Levi’s captured and played to superbly, with the laundromat ad and others.

Which young guy didn’t want to be the cool handsome young rebel, with the young girls drooling over him? Not only did it sell a shitload of jeans; it accidentally also sold a shitload of boxer shorts. Until then they were something Orson Welles might have been wearing, a long while after Citizen Kane, when he was fat and old, and reduced to advertising sherry.

Through the story of Kane’s life (not Welles') it seemed that he was able to have anything he wanted, apart from one thing. He had an agonizing itch – his “rosebud” – that he couldn’t scratch.

If and when we find our consumers’ “rosebuds,” of course, we then need to find what to do with them. But that’s often the easier part. And I'm a creative. Because if you hit on a real but hidden truth – what we often like to call an ‘insight’ – the creative idea can sometimes almost write itself. It’s when we don’t have it, that we really struggle. Then we just come up with bland, clichéd ‘content’ that doesn’t resonate with anyone. Instead, it just bores and even irritates them. But not like an itch.

In Citizen Kane (if you haven't seen it) does the reporter, through his diligent detective work finally uncover the meaning of “rosebud?” Do we? Well, if you really want to know the essence or measure of the man – like we should always try to know the measure of our consumers – you need to do the legwork. Watch the movie.