How an Ad Campaign Created the Diamond Gemstone

When you look at the 1930s, few Americans proposed with all the valuable rock. Then every thing changed.

I gave a lot of thought to how I was going to do it when I decided to propose to the woman who is now my wife. But i did not think much by what I became likely to do so with. Not just did an engagement ring appear the logical—nay, the inevitable—choice, but I’d simply the really diamond. My grandfather had scrounged up money that is enough obtain a band for my grandmother in the early 1950s, and also the stone had passed away in my experience as he passed on. We reset the diamond in a far more band that is modern got the ring appraised, and slipped it back at my fiancee’s hand.

It absolutely was a gorgeous moment—a gesture of love and dedication spanning generations. Also it has also been what De Beers Consolidated Mines, Ltd. Desired. I became a marketing that is century-old, actualized. And I also’m not even close to alone; three-quarters of American brides wear a diamond gemstone, which now costs on average $4,000.

From time to time, a write-up arrives which makes you completely reconsider a rote practice.

Edward Jay Epstein’s « Have You Ever attempted to offer a Diamond?  » had been one of these. Inside the 1982 Atlantic tale, the investigative journalist deconstructed exactly what he termed the « diamond invention »—the « creation for the indisputable fact that diamonds are unusual and valuable, and so are crucial signs of esteem. « 

That innovation is interestingly present: Epstein traces its origins into the breakthrough of massive diamond mines in Southern Africa into the belated century that is 19th which the very first time flooded globe areas with diamonds. The British entrepreneurs running the South African mines respected that just by keeping the fiction that diamonds had been scarce and inherently important could they protect their opportunities and diamond that is buoy. They did therefore by starting A southern Africa–based cartel, De Beers Consolidated Mines, Ltd. (now De Beers), in 1888, and meticulously expanding the business’s control of all areas of the diamond trade into the ensuing years.

Many remarkably, De Beers manipulated not merely provide but need. In 1938, amid the ravages of this despair therefore the rumblings of war, Harry Oppenheimer, the De Beers creator’s son, recruited the latest York–based advertisement agency N.W. Ayer to burnish the image of diamonds in the us, in which the training of offering diamond engagement bands have been unevenly gaining traction for a long time, but where in fact the diamonds offered had been increasingly little and low-quality.

Meanwhile, the cost of diamonds had been dropping around the globe. The people at Ayer attempt to persuade young men that diamonds (and just diamonds) had been synonymous with relationship, and therefore the way of measuring a guy’s love (as well as their individual and success that is professional had been straight proportional to your size and quality of this diamond he purchased. Women, in change, must be convinced that courtship concluded, invariably, in a diamond.

Ayer insinuated these communications in to the nooks and crannies of popular tradition. It advertised concept, not a diamond or brand name:

Film idols, the paragons of relationship for the mass market, will be provided diamonds to make use of as their symbols of indestructible love. In addition, the agency recommended stories that are offering society photographs to chosen mags and magazines which may reinforce the hyperlink between diamonds and love. Tales would stress the dimensions of diamonds that celebrities provided to their nearest and dearest, and photographs would conspicuously show the glittering rock in the hand of a well-known girl. Fashion designers would talk on radio programs concerning the « trend towards diamonds » that Ayer planned to start out.

The advertising agency in its 1947 strategy plan. Outlined a slight system that included organizing for lecturers to consult with high schools in the united states. « Each one of these lectures revolve across the diamond gemstone, and therefore are reaching tens of thousands of girls inside their assemblies, classes and casual conferences in our leading educational institutions,  » the agency explained in a memorandum to De Beers. The agency had arranged, in 1946, a regular service called « Hollywood Personalities,  » which offered 125 leading newspapers with information regarding the diamonds donned by celebrities. In 1947, the agency commissioned a number of portraits of « engaged socialites.  » The concept would be to produce prestigious « role models » for the poorer middle-class wage-earners. The marketing agency explained, in its 1948 strategy paper, « We distribute the expressed term of diamonds used by movie movie stars of display and stage, by spouses and daughters of governmental leaders, by any woman who are able to result in the grocer’s wife therefore the mechanic’s sweetheart state ‘If only I had just what she’s got. ‘ »

Within the belated 1940s, prior to my grandfather began looking for his band, an Ayer copywriter conceived associated with the motto that De Beers has utilized from the time: « A Diamond Is Forever.  » « Even though diamonds can certainly be shattered, chipped, discolored, or incinerated to ash, the thought of eternity completely captured the qualities that are magical the marketing agency wished to attribute to diamonds,  » Epstein writes. A diamond that’s forever guarantees romance that is endless companionship. However a forever diamond normally the one that’s maybe maybe maybe not resold. Resold diamonds (and it’s really maddeningly difficult to resell them, as Epstein’s article details) cause changes in diamond costs, which undermine general general public self- self- confidence within the intrinsic farmers only worth of diamonds. Diamonds which are stowed away in safe-deposit bins, or bequeathed to grandchildren, do not.

Between 1939 and 1979, De Beers’s wholesale diamond product sales in the usa increased from $23 million to $2.1 billion. Over those four years, the business’s advertisement spending plan soared from $200,000 to ten dollars million per year.

A 1960 De Beers advertising in Reader’s consume

De Beers and its particular marketers proved extraordinarily adaptable at molding public perceptions. If the U.S. Engagement market seemed tapped away, a campaign that is new the gift of an extra diamond in order to reaffirm relationship later on in wedding. When small Soviet diamonds entered the marketplace, individuals were told that how big diamonds (instead of their quality, color, and cut, or the simple motion of purchasing a diamond into the beginning) didn’t matter much in the end. (Some gambits backfired, such as the diamond-ring-for-men misadventure of this 1980s. )

So when De Beers sought to enhance internationally within the mid-1960s, it did not flinch at entering markets like Japan’s, the place where a deeply rooted tradition of arranged marriages left space that is little premarital relationship, aside from diamond engagement bands. De Beers, Epstein writes, aggressively marketed diamond bands in Japan as tokens of « modern Western values.  » In 1967, once the campaign began, lower than 5 per cent of betrothed Japanese females had a diamond gemstone. By 1981, that figure had risen up to 60 per cent, and Japan had get to be the market that is second-largest following the usa, for diamond engagement bands. De Beers conjured up « a diamond that is billion-dollar-a-year in Japan, where matrimonial customized had survived feudal revolutions, globe wars, industrialization, and also the US career,  » Epstein marvels.

De Beers had much more success in Japan than it did far away like Brazil, where men and women typically wear a easy band on their right hand while involved and switch the ring with their left hand as soon as hitched. Nevertheless the transformation that is social took spot in Japan into the 1970s might be saying it self today in Asia, where, based on a present Citigroup report (which depends on De Beers information), significantly more than 30 % of Chinese brides now get diamond engagement rings. The training hardly existed within the nation within the 1990s.

Percentage of First-Time Brides Who Receive Diamond Engagement Rings

A 2014 report by Bain & business likewise noted that Asia, Asia, plus the united states of america will drive the majority of development in diamond-jewelry usage throughout the decade that is next in component as a result of growing desire for diamond engagement bands in Asia and China, and stable desire for the U.S.

A Forecast of Rough-Diamond Demand Growth Through 2024