De Beers: Encyclopedia II - De Beers - Marketing

De Beers - Marketing

De Beers has proactively promoted diamonds as being symbolic of eternity and love, and therefore the ideal jewel for an engagement or wedding ring. Their famously successful advertising campaigns have included measures such as:

• showing diamonds as wedding gifts in popular romance films
• publishing stories in magazines and newspapers which would emphasize the romantic value of diamonds and associate them with celebrities
• employing fashion designers and other trendsetters to promote the trend on radio and, later, television
• enlisting the British Royal Family to directly promote diamonds

This campaign was described by De Beers' PR agency N.W. Ayer & Son as "a new form of advertising which has been widely imitated ever since" with "no brand name to be impressed on the public mind. There was simply an idea—the eternal emotional value surrounding the diamond." Indeed, the campaign succeeded in reviving the American diamond market, which had been weakened by "competitive luxuries", and in opening new markets where none had existed before. In Japan, for example, diamonds were successfully promoted as a western symbol of status, which coincided with Japan's cultural opening after World War II. Japan, which had no diamond tradition before the De Beers campaign, is today the second largest market for retail diamonds.

The slogan "A Diamond is Forever," invented by Ayer, is one of the most successful slogans in marketing history. Its purpose is to prevent the creation of a secondary market by dissuading women from selling the diamonds they have received and by discouraging them from buying diamonds which other women have owned. The consequence of this is that retailers can sell diamonds at a high price without competition from a secondary market, and it allows De Beers to maintain control of the diamond trade at wholesale level.

This was incorporated in the James Bond film Diamonds Are Forever where De Beers is directly cited.

Adapted from the Wikipedia article "Marketing", under the G.N U Free Docmentation License. Please also see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki