Free Lunch For Diamond Merchants?

From the 1940s De Beers heavily promoted the link between romance and diamonds. Out of this campaign came the phrase “A Diamond is Forever”.

As it turns out, the campaign not only sold diamonds then and there, but also instilled the link between diamonds and romance in Western culture.

Over the next 60 years, this message has continued to be promoted to consumers around the world, seeing the value of diamonds being retaining from generation to generation.

So, the question now is, do you, as a consumer pay for all this advertising?

Probability says that you will pay for about 40% of it, as that is the percentage of the world’s gem quality diamonds are produced by De Beers. However, De Beer’s competitors such as BHP and Rio Tinto are clearly benefiting from over 60 years of De Beers’ advertising.

The fact is, that the entire diamond industry, from miners to retailers, is indeed getting a free lunch from four simple words: A Diamond is Forever.

This entry was written by Nikhil Jogia and was posted on on Wednesday, March 21st, 2007 at 4:13 pm and is filed under Diamond Industry. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.