Diamonds

Last night I linked to this diary at about the history of "blood diamonds" at Booman Tribune. This is something I'd never known before...

The poverty caused by the depression in the 1930s and World War II in the forties severely depressed the diamond market. Oppenheimer's son Harry took over De Beers and went to America to hire an ad company to help them sell more diamonds. He hired N.W. Ayer to launch a marketing campaign, which garnered De Beers the world-famous slogan "A Diamond is Forever." As the article linked above states:

The goal behind the marketing campaign was to ensure that women kept their diamonds literally forever. The goal was to prevent a secondary market for diamonds by persuading women that diamonds should be untouched by another woman to really have any meaning. This allowed De Beers to maintain control of the diamond trade at wholesale level and retailers to sell diamonds at a high price without competition from secondary markets. [...] It was this marketing campaign that made diamond wedding and engagement rings so popular, and pushed diamonds to become the number one coveted gem by women.

As I noted last night, Demetrius recently commented that the diamond ads have gotten obnoxious in their frequency these days. Then he remembered, "Oh, that's right, Valentine's Day is coming..."

It's amazing to me that the diamond people were able to pull off a marketing coup of such proportions. The whole "two months salary" recommendation, for example.

There was something on Saturday Night Live some years ago, mentioning that recommendation, and then the commentator added, "and the American Crack Association recommends that you spend 100% of your salary on crack".

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