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]