Can De Beers Modernize ‘A Diamond Is Forever’?
Diamond Marketing: Part 2
De Beers faces a creative challenge in its venture back to category marketing.
Whereas historically, natural diamonds were viewed as the ultimate gift for everlasting love, more recent research “flags up all kinds of changes with the new consumer,” explains Sally Morrison, natural diamonds market lead at De Beers.
Younger generations define themselves in a very different way, Morrison stresses.
“While they’re still interested in the intensity of relationships, they’re also very immersed in self-identity, evolving themselves before committing to another person,” she adds. “The connection with another person is not an end goal, whereas the journey and self-expression are important.”
That demands a vastly different approach to marketing than what was required when De Beers previously engaged in broad-scale category marketing (a strategy to promote diamonds as a generic product group). It involves repositioning the concept of ‘A Diamond Is Forever’ in a way that is “relevant to this new set of conversations,” Morrison emphasizes.
That’s an exciting prospect for De Beers, considering the slogan has around 90% recognition among US consumers, and 95% among those over age 45, its research shows. “Nobody is that famous,” Morrison asserts. “It’s a huge opportunity for us as we can contextualize [the strapline] in new kinds of communications and situations and infuse meaning that will be relevant to a new generation.”
If in the past ‘A Diamond is Forever’ evoked the concept of eternal love, today it means different things to different people, she adds. The challenge for De Beers is therefore to home-in on the emotional meaning that the phrase, and by extension, a diamond, might conjure up.
Its attempt to tap into consumers’ sense of self was evident in its recent ‘Worth the Wait’ collaboration with Signet Jewelers. “Love, it starts with self-worth,” the opening line of the advert declared. “Because to find someone worthy of love, we must first be worthy ourselves,” it continued.
Changing Approach
De Beers has embarked on its own journey of self-realization. The company famously financed and ran category marketing campaigns throughout the last century, capitalizing on the cultural phenomenon that ‘A Diamond is Forever’ became.
It changed its approach in the early 2000s, arguing that consumers were gravitating toward brands, and that companies could more effectively engage with consumers by expressing their values through the name recognition and story of their product.
De Beers introduced its Forevermark retail brand in 2008 and shelved ‘A Diamond is Forever,’ while drastically reducing its budget for generic marketing. It also urged the rest of the trade to do their bit to raise the desire for natural diamonds. The Supplier of Choice program, through its various iterations in the early 2000s enticed sightholders (De Beers contract clients) to develop their own downstream branding programs.
Around 2017, De Beers began to streamline its corporate identity, bringing its various businesses – spanning its mining, rough distribution, grading and retail operations – under one De Beers logo. It also gradually reintroduced ‘A Diamond is Forever’ as its underlying corporate tagline, all while continuing to expand its Forevermark retail footprint.
The company changed tack again last year with the introduction of its ‘Origins’ strategy. That saw De Beers refocus Forevermark solely on the Indian market, terminating the brand in all other markets. The strategy also encompassed “scaling up” the De Beers Jewellers retail business, which this week rebranded as De Beers London, “a name that emphasizes its place in the high-end luxury world,” the group said.
While the retail brands have their own separate messaging, the Origins program announced De Beers’ return to category marketing. The strategy would embrace “new approaches that maximize reach and impact to grow desire for natural diamonds,” the company explained.
A Retail Focus
The plan emphasizes collaborations with retail jewelers, given the critical role they play in the diamond acquisition journey.
De Beers has forged partnerships with Signet Jewelers in the US, Chow Tai Fook in China, and Tanishq in India, the largest jewelers in their respective markets. It has developed separate programs for independent jewelers in the US and in India.
Each program has a different focus, suggests Morrison, whose role is to oversee the US market plus these marketing partnerships with retailers.
In China, the emphasis is purely on digital. De Beers and Chow Tai Fook are working with approximately 50 influences to create a body of content that shifts the narrative away from the consumer perception that natural diamonds are a commodity-like investment vehicle, to something with which one has an emotional connection, she explains.
The partnership with Tanishq aims to enhance consumer education, interest and confidence, and to promote natural diamonds across India, De Beers said when announcing the collaboration. The company in January also teamed up with the Gem & Jewellery Export Promotion Council (GJEPC) to help India’s independent retail jewelers in their natural diamond marketing efforts.
A Critical Mass
De Beers is working with US independents in a different way. It is looking to leverage ‘A Diamond is Forever,’ having reintroduced it as a category marketing tool in the 2023 ‘Seize the Day’ holiday campaign, and in last season’s ‘Forever Present’ advertising. The promotional assets were available to US jewelers free of charge.
The De Beers-Signet ‘Worth the Wait’ collaboration was launched in mid-October to promote natural diamonds in the bridal segment – an area in which lab-grown diamonds made surprising inroads in recent years.
Considering the changing attitudes of younger consumers, Morrison views the bridal category quite loosely. It encompasses “the most emotional moment when people connect with other people, whether it’s a conventional engagement ring, a commitment ring, or a promise ring,” she explains. “We want to get to that generation who are just moving into those kinds of very powerful and meaningful connections with other people.”
Signet, with some 2,300 stores across the US, has the critical mass that enables them “to build the communications pressure,” Morrison notes. Training Signet’s 18,000 sales associates in natural diamond messaging was a crucial component of the campaign, and that will need to continue, she adds.
Exciting Challenge
It’s still too early to assess the effectiveness of the campaign beyond the tests the companies did ahead of the launch, Morrison says. As with De Beers’ collaborations in India and China, the Signet partnership is an ongoing effort, which requires continual refreshing.
With a full year since ‘Seize the Day’ initiated De Beers return to category marketing, the company can start to evaluate the performance of its various programs. “Based on that, we can now assess where to improve and where the opportunities are,” she explains. “I just can't yet tell you what that's going to look like [for 2025].”
The digital environment enables marketers with flexibility to make those tweaks and improvements through the various stages of a campaign rollout. It also represents another change in the way De Beers must think about category marketing.
“We have to get to people wherever they are and that requires a really sophisticated digital approach,” Morrison says, pointing to the research consumers do online, their engagement on social media platforms, e-commerce purchases, and their in-store presence. “Everything has changed with the digital disruption.”
Morrison hints to the major developments that have taken effect during De Beers’ hiatus from category marketing in the last decade or two.
Today, the company is operating in a multi-layered environment as opposed to a singular one, she explains. Marketers are navigating far greater nuance in the way people express themselves, where they engage, and the type of emotional moments they experience and celebrate.
“It’s more difficult, and it is challenging,” she admits. “But creatively it’s very exciting.”
This article is the second in a series about the industry’s approach to marketing natural diamonds. See part 1 here: Just Give me My Money
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