In this blog, I am going to discuss how marketing can lead a product that is intrinsically valueless, like diamonds, to success. How marketing can be used to propagate the idea of apparent value and how people can be tricked out of thousands of dollars with clever marketing.

The well-known adage “diamonds are a girl’s best friend” was manufactured by De beers in the late 1930s, when de beers saw a stagnation in their revenue. [i]The stagnation lead them to move to New York and hiring an advertising company. The prices of diamonds were falling, people were not buying diamonds and without the same appreciation for the stones De beers had to in some way manufacture demand for their product, and that is exactly what they did. The pioneered one of the first and most successful advertisement campaigns in history, they manage to equivocate the love of a man to the size of the diamond ring that they could buy you. They did it with clever taglines “diamonds are forever”, “diamonds are girl’s best friend” and a lot of celebrity endorsement and that managed to convince the average consumer into buying the precious stones.

Diamonds are intrinsically worthless, meaning that they have no real value, the only value they have is what is perceived. At the beginning of the 1800s diamonds were valued so highly because only monarchs were available to afford them. Therefore, the stakeholders of the diamond industry were only the British monarch[ii] at that point but when De Beers’ broke out of South Africa and started selling to a larger consumer base; most consumers only bought the diamonds to be more like the monarchy, back then Great Britain was very much appreciative of their monarchs…

Diamonds have relied heavily on things like monarchy and clever taglines for their value, and to be honest, this is preposterous; Gold, is valued highly because it is very rare, very good conductor, used to value currency. Diamonds are abundant, useless but they are pretty to look at. That is why De Beers equating diamonds to love was an incredibly smart move on their part. The made a valueless product like a diamond have emotional worth to the consumer increasing its value proposition when one buys a diamond they are no longer buying a super pressurised and heated chunk of coal, they are buying love and that is worth more than anything man can buy.[iii]

[i]

THE INCREDIBLE STORY OF HOW DE BEERS CREATED AND LOST THE MOST POWERFUL MONOPOLY EVER

[ii]

THE INCREDIBLE STORY OF HOW DE BEERS CREATED AND LOST THE MOST POWERFUL MONOPOLY EVER

[iii]

For this blog post I want to talk about child labor and the controversies behind it, what I will be talking about is from Primark’s situation, my dad’s experience with child labor, my experience with people who still advocate child labor and it is just my opinion on it. I will be using Primark as a stimulus

When Primark was found to have been using children as a way to keep their costs low the whole market was thrown out of whack, primary being the top producer of budget clothes and owning the biggest market share, its demise would have been very detrimental to its consumers. There are no substitutes for primary in the market so people just decided to slowly talk less and less about the fact that the sources of Primark’s goods were not ethical, this is due in part to the fact that a large majority of the public depends on Primark’s low-cost clothes and also the public is slowly getting charity saturation, ie, they see so many charities and horrible things happening worldwide start becoming mundane and less relevant. Therefore, the consumers stayed loyal. Primark lost a bit of money trying to recover their public standing but not much in comparison with the amount of revenue it receives.

That is the consumer side of the story, on the other side of the story. The producers were in third world countries in which labor laws are more flexible and they were employing children of all ages to work in sweatshops for as little as 60p a day (a little under a dollar a day). The children who were working there were being taken advantage off but, is it really all that bad? I am not advocating Primark’s decisions, but the parts in India in which they were using child labor were devoid of any education systems, there are copious amounts of children out on the streets making money any which way they can and there are even larger amounts of underage prostitution and drug trafficking in these areas. Getting a job in one of these sweatshops would be far more favorable than any of the other ways to make ends meet. At least in the sweatshops, there is a constant stream of revenue, and it assures that they can make ends meet.

My family was not always as well off as it is now, my dad began working as a builder for my grandfather as the ripe old age of 5, he was a cement mixer, this was all while still in school, the education system of Mexico at the time was nothing more than a joke, if it was not for the fact that my father’s whole family worked all 8 of them would not have survived to this point, they lived in a small mud shack and although child labour is not something that should be perceived as good, it’s still the very reason why some people today are alive. In the time of my parents, if you were not in working you would have been sold off to another family or just sold off into labor houses, if it wasn’t for the fact that my dad was started working from such a young age my aunts would have been sold off. Thanks to the money he got from his labor he was able to attend university and has far surpassed any expectations of him.

Child labor is detrimental to the children as it exploits them and underpays them, however, for some it is the best alternative. Yes, there are ways we can intervene but it is not like we can help every single child and there is no feasible way to fund the necessary upgrade on the education systems in third world countries. To be honest, it feels a bit hypocritical when developed economies look down on the underdeveloped economies for using child labour, it has been used by most if not all economies in the past, the British economy used it during the industrial revolution and if it was not for that it is possible that they would not have been able to develope to the point where child labour is no longer necessary.

I myself have no first-hand experience with child labor, being born into a prolific household, however, I have met people, families that are still tied with the idea of using children for labor. On one of my volunteer trips to Cambodia I experienced first hand that the children are not only exploited by the businesses but are also exploited by their parents in order for them to work more instead of studying, the parents who have not had any education themselves believe that labor is far more important than going to school.

Reference:

EXPOSED: PRIMARK’S SWEATSHOPS THAT PAY CHILDREN JUST 60P A DAY