Have You Ever Tried to Sell a Diamond?
The history of how diamond advertising has changed over the last 100 years and how it has affected sales. Interesting to note that the rarity of diamonds was controlled and increased by the companies selling it so they could charge more.
The diamond invention—the creation of the idea that diamonds are rare and valuable, and are essential signs of esteem—is a relatively recent development in the history of the diamond trade. Until the late nineteenth century, diamonds were found only in a few riverbeds in India and in the jungles of Brazil, and the entire world production of gem diamonds amounted to a few pounds a year. In 1870, however, huge diamond mines were discovered near the Orange River, in South Africa, where diamonds were soon being scooped out by the ton. Suddenly, the market was deluged with diamonds. The British financiers who had organized the South African mines quickly realized that their investment was endangered; diamonds had little intrinsic value—and their price depended almost entirely on their scarcity. The financiers feared that when new mines were developed in South Africa, diamonds would become at best only semiprecious gems.
The major investors in the diamond mines realized that they had no alternative but to merge their interests into a single entity that would be powerful enough to control production and perpetuate the illusion of scarcity of diamonds. The instrument they created, in 1888, was called De Beers Consolidated Mines, Ltd., incorporated in South Africa.
[via Kottke]
Have You Ever Tried to Sell a Diamond?
13 October 2011 01:00pm UTC • 52 views • 1 comment
Tagged with diamonds, advertising
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1 comment
The Anonymous Poppy
22 October 2011 08:13pm UTC
Wow, this article is AMAZING. I already knew about part of the "diamond invention," as the article calls it: that diamonds are not rare and have no intrinsic value, but that their supply from mines to wholesalers is completely controlled by one or two companies in order to manufacture a sense of scarcity and stability.
But I had NO IDEA about the type of major advertising work that had gone into the way that we think about diamonds conceptually as a culture. I found these parts most fascinating/creepy:
In its 1947 strategy plan, the advertising agency strongly emphasized a psychological approach. "We are dealing with a problem in mass psychology. We seek to ... strengthen the tradition of the diamond engagement ring -- to make it a psychological necessity capable of competing successfully at the retail level with utility goods and services...." (emphasis mine)
and
the advertising agency argued, "It is essential that these pressures be met by the constant publicity to show that only the diamond is everywhere accepted and recognized as the symbol of betrothal."
and
"Since 1939 an entirely new generation of young people has grown to marriageable age," it said. "To this new generation a diamond ring is considered a necessity to engagements by virtually everyone." The message had been so successfully impressed on the minds of this generation that those who could not afford to buy a diamond at the time of their marriage would "defer the purchase" rather than forgo it.
It is so amazing to me that an advertising company can set out such an enormous goal like that... and then actually achieve it. ARE WE SHEEP??
And then there's the part about engagement rings in Japan:
The campaign was remarkably successful. Until 1959, the importation of diamonds had not even been permitted by the postwar Japanese government. When the campaign began, in 1967, not quite 5 percent of engaged Japanese women received a diamond engagement ring. By 1972, the proportion had risen to 27 percent. By 1978, half of all Japanese women who were married wore a diamond; by 1981, some 60 percent of Japanese brides wore diamonds. In a mere fourteen years, the 1,500-year Japanese tradition had been radically revised. Diamonds became a staple of the Japanese marriage. Japan became the second largest market, after the United States, for the sale of diamond engagement rings.
I'm not sure how I feel about this AT ALL. I mean, I have no personal investment in Japanese culture, and the fact is: cultures change. Traditions and accepted attitudes change all the time. And I guess that they probably change in response to surprisingly "small" things, like a single campaign from a single advertising agency, more often than we realize. It just seems... kind of sad? That sweeping cultural change can be brought about because this one company just really wanted to make more money.
Okay, and then there's this part:
Through a series of "projective" psychological questions, meant "to draw out a respondent's innermost feelings about diamond jewelry," the study attempted to examine further the semi-passive role played by women in receiving diamonds. The male-female roles seemed to resemble closely the sex relations in a Victorian novel. "Man plays the dominant, active role in the gift process. Woman's role is more subtle, more oblique, more enigmatic...." The woman seemed to believe there was something improper about receiving a diamond gift. Women spoke in interviews about large diamonds as "flashy, gaudy, overdone" and otherwise inappropriate. Yet the study found that "Buried in the negative attitudes ... lies what is probably the primary driving force for acquiring them. Diamonds are a traditional and conspicuous signal of achievement, status and success." It noted, for example, "A woman can easily feel that diamonds are 'vulgar' and still be highly enthusiastic about receiving diamond jewelry." The element of surprise, even if it is feigned, plays the same role of accommodating dissonance in accepting a diamond gift as it does in prime sexual seductions: it permits the woman to pretend that she has not actively participated in the decision. She thus retains both her innocence—and the diamond.
Sorry for the tl:dr quote, but seriously. This is SO INTERESTING. These ad campaigns have made women want diamonds, but also made it culturally unacceptable to admit that they want diamonds. JUST LIKE SEX. (I mean the "unacceptable to admit desire" part, not the actual desire part. I don't think ads make women want sex.) I am so suspicious of the language in the reporting from this survey study that's quoted here, about how women have "negative attitudes" about diamonds but also a genuine desire to own them. And of course they don't actually like diamonds, they just want them as a symbol of status. Like, doesn't it make more sense to assume that the women surveyed consistently do want diamonds and just feel pressured to lie about how much they want them? You know, JUST LIKE WITH SEX. It's silly to speculate about a decades-old survey from which I'm reading very small quotes through third-hand reporting, I know. This is all super interesting, though.
Anyway, I'd love to read an article like this that's more recent. I really want to know what's been happening in the diamond industry for the last thirty years now, especially since the article ends on kind of a cliffhanger.