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Diamond Marketing by De Beers:
The Biggest Fraud on WomankindBy: Erum Qureshi
Summary: That 'a diamond is forever'
is the probably the world's
greatest, most expensive and widely
circulated PR scam!
The on-going, century-long campaign
by diamond giant De Beers owned by
the Oppenheimer family began in
1938; De Beers needed a slogan for
diamonds that expressed both the
theme of romance and everlasting
love.
 Consequently, N.W Ayer, De Beers'
New York based ad agency, came up
with the line 'A diamond is
forever'. Even though diamonds can
be shattered, chipped, discolored or
reduced to ash, the concept of
eternity perfectly captured the
magical qualities their client
wanted to attribute to their
product. The campaign began in
America and projected the diamond
onto the man-woman relationship,
subtly altering the public's view of
the way a man courts, and wins a
woman. That it was forever also
aimed to associate the stone with a
sentiment that inhibited the public
from ever reselling it. Ask anyone
who has tried reselling their
diamonds, and they will tell you how
it is practically impossible to even
recover a diamond's cost price, let
alone make a profit on that
investment.
De Beers controls over 60% of the
world's diamond market; it has
stockpiles of the stones and sets
the price on them. However, this
invention was more than just a
monopoly for fixing diamond prices,
it was a strategy formulated for De
Beers by N.W Ayer in America and
later followed by J. Walter Thompson
in the rest of the world for
converting carbon crystals into
globally accepted icons of wealth,
romance and power.
 The diamond ring was pitched not as
a marketable product but as a symbol
of everlasting love and security and
an inseparable part of courtship and
marital bliss. There was no direct
sale to be made, no brand name to be
impressed on the public, just the
idea of eternal emotional value
surrounding the diamond. The pitch
succeeded. And how! Except for those
few stones that have been destroyed,
every gem quality diamond that has
ever been cut and polished still
exists today.
Kimberly diamond mine, owned by De Beers group
Nearly a hundred million women wear
diamonds, while millions of others
keep them in vaults and safe-deposit
boxes as family heirlooms. The
public holds an estimated 500
million carats of gem quality
diamonds (more than fifty times the
annual production of gem quality
diamonds in any given year by De
Beers). If a significant section of
the public ever decided to put these
diamonds up for sale in the market,
the price so carefully controlled
and sustained by De Beers could
never be maintained. For the diamond
invention to survive, for De Beers
itself to survive, these hundred
million women had to be stopped from
ever parting with their diamonds.
It was the symbolism, not the value.
The idea that diamonds are a gift of
love: the larger and finer the
diamond, the greater the expression
of love. Men are aware of the
symbolism value, which is why they
have to buy a diamond ring even if
they know it's a creation of the De
Beers monopoly. De Beers spent
millions to ingrain in the minds of
everyone that they have to shell out
thousands for the diamond if a man
wants to marry his woman. It was how
one could make 'two months' salary
last forever'!
De Beers sent representatives to
high schools across the country to
teach young girls about the value of
diamonds and feed them romantic
dreams. Word was spread by diamonds
worn by Hollywood stars, British
Royalty and wives and daughters of
political leaders and celebrities,
by women who could make the common
man's wife or girlfriend say 'I wish
I had what she has'. Love began to
be measured in carats.
In the 1960's diamonds were
discovered in Siberia and De Beers
saw its control-supply chain
monopoly being threatened. It closed
a secret deal with the Soviets to
market these small stones and the
marketing campaign for 'eternity
anniversary rings' was launched,
targeting an entirely new market of
older married women.
Perhaps the biggest controversy De
Beers ever faced was that of
Conflict Diamonds. Although the
industry has started following the
Kimberly process (wherein a diamond
is monitored and certified at every
point of its production process),
not very long ago De Beers was still
buying Angolan diamonds and
insisting that tracking stones was
unfeasible. No ad campaign for De
Beers ever highlighted the fact that
mining undertaken in African
countries violate innumerable human
rights. In these mines, small
children are made to dig in small
underground pits, where men and
women can't fit, even though child
labor is illegal.
Workers and communities in and
around mines suffer due to state
orchestrated repression, toxic
run-off from unsafe mining
practices, tuberculosis, HIV
infections, prostitution, immune
disorders, racial discrimination and
slavery. In the past decade,
millions of people have been
dispossessed of their livelihoods,
land, future and their lives in
places like Katanga, Congo and Zaire
where De Beers has its mining
operations. Such topics are off the
agenda for De Beers, the media and
the women who choose to wear these
diamonds. For them, it serves to 1)
Reassure them that a man values
them,
2) Reassures them that he is
financially stable, and
3) Draws respect from other women
because of Nos. 1 and 2.
The question why the people from the
world's richest mining metropolises
are also one of the world's poorest
and most downtrodden does not occur
to anyone.
Back home in India where 80 % of the
world's diamonds are cut, children
are given the smallest stones to
work on because their eyes and
fingers are better suited for
shaping the tiny facets. These
children suffer from eyestrain,
repetitive motion injuries and
lacerated lungs from diamond dust.
Skilled laborers in India earn less
than 1/5th of what their
counterparts in Europe or America
do. Where is the romance in that?
Today, being faced with increased
competition, the threat of synthetic
diamonds and newly discovered
diamond reserves, De Beers has
decided to stop buying the world's
surplus diamonds as it has been
doing all these decades to control
supply. It markets itself as a clean
diamond company, guaranteeing
bloodless stones because it lies in
its best commercial interests to do
so. It would even suit De Beers if
the supply of African diamonds
somehow dried up; they could then
get rid of its $4bn stockpile of
accumulated carbon. As always,
exploiters minimize the awareness of
the resources they target, laying
emphasis instead on the glamour and
lure of the product they market.
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