Economic Process in De Beers Forever - Essay Example

Economic Process in De Beers’ Forever 1. De Beers’ Forever campaign is the result of its shift from the monopoly in the diamond supply to more of marketing diamonds to the consumers. Firstly they assume that diamonds are mostly bought by men and secondly they buy them for women. This creates for them a domain to target men as their target market. A look at their ‘Journey Campaign’ will give us an idea how they have used the marketing and advertising tactics to persuade their customers. If you see the TV Ad for Journey campaign, this presents two dandelions flowing in the air form place to place (adiamondisforever, 2006). This works as an attention catcher for the audience as the dandelions presents no idea to the audience what the advertisement is actually about. The attention is also created by the rhyme that is played in the background sung by Dusty Springfield. The rhyme is very slow in tone, more of a slow jazz song which is very catchy in nature. Then the interest is created by dandelions moving from place to place with the words of the rhymes portraying a girl asking her lover some time of his life and to be with her forever that sketches meaning of De Beers’ slogan ‘A Diamond is forever’. They have used three pairs of living things spending moments together; a pair of dandelions, a pair of horses and a couple of men and women. Each presents the quality time they spend together, actually inciting the emotions of their target audience, the engaged, just married or old couples. Then they show the couple romancing with each other at the beach and a guy gifting her girl one of the necklace designs from Journey collection. This creates a desire in the target audience about the Journey collection as they attach their brand with valuable moments of Love which persuades their target audience to embellish their moments also with Diamonds to create an everlasting effect true and eternal love in their relation. Now to end up the advertisement they have not put up a conventional action tagline, rather they have shown one of the pieces from Journey collection with their tag line, With Every Step Love Grows, and their slogan A Diamond is Forever at the end since the trade magazine Advertising Age has called this four-word line the greatest advertising slogan of the twentieth century. The slogan was created by the copywriter Frances Gerety of N.W. Ayer. This advertising is Lifestyle type advertising where attractive people (in terms of the relation they are experiencing) are shown associated with the brand. The overall Journey campaign includes the product placement in the Emmy Awards. JWT, the advertising agency that created the campaign, arranged for celebrities to wear the Journey collection at the Emmy Awards 2006 (Vranica S. 2006). This is called Testimonial Advertising. The product design of Journey Collection matches with that of the brand message ‘With Every Step, Love Grows’. The product design is such that each design with at least 4 diamonds with every next diamond is bigger in size than the preceding one. This new style is intended to symbolize how you love for each other grow stronger over time (Ottum R. 2006). Talking about their print ads, if we give a look at the 2nd ad under the title of ‘seize the day’ which says that “This Christmas Make Her Believe All Over Again”, we see that the wordings are meant to portray men as the prime audience. This clearly identifies the target market in the eyes of DeBeers’ marketers. They believe that though the consumers of their diamonds are women but men are the actual customer of their diamond and so they have target men as their audience in the copywriting of these ads. The word ‘Her’ in this line conforms to their second assumption that men buy these diamond for women. Similarly if we look at the 4th advertisement of ‘seize the day’ which says ‘It’s from You. She Will Never See It Coming.’, we will see the same idea that the target audience is men and it is depicted that men buy diamonds for women (asadvertised, 2007). 2. We have seen DeBeers selling small diamonds as well as selling large diamonds. It has sold diamond to women who use diamonds as well as to the men who buy diamonds to give as a gift to women. The thing that DeBeers still need to do is to sell diamonds to men who are buying as well as users. With the popularity of jewelry among men and more and more jewelers working on men’s jewelry DeBeers have a very large market open to them. These days we see many of men celebrities wearing jewelry studded with diamonds but they are wearing it because of their own passion about jewelry. They have not been persuaded by any marketer properly as a potential buyer as well as user. Corporate Executives are expected to be updated in every sense, starting from their field of business or job to the latest trends in clothing. Today you will see many of corporate executives wear jewelry or ear pin studded with diamonds. Secondly if we see sportsmen around us, we see many of them wearing jewelries in their daily lives. We see David Beckham wearing a diamond studded ear pin, 50 cents’ lead vocalist wearing a lot of jewelry and many other men celebrities have interest in wearing jewelries. Now What kind of image DeBeers can associate with its men’s line of Jewelry? Now De Beers can associate an executive image with its men range of diamond jewelry. So that men will be able to feel themselves wearing something that is highly regarded in the society around them and this will give them the confidence and pride in moving around. Men’s jewelry is a very big market. We see almost all the millionaires and billionaires in this world are men keeping few exceptions aside. With such a major chunk of world’s total fortune in the hands of men, why not to persuade them for having diamonds for their own use. 3. De Beers abandoned its monopoly over the supply of diamonds and shifted its concern towards retailing the diamonds in its own stores. On Jan. 16 the company announced it had formed a new company, in partnership with French conglomerate LVMH Moet Hennessy Louis Vuitton, to develop a retail strategy for the De Beers brand (Stein N. 2001). (Source: http://www.harpercollege.edu/mhealy/eco211/lectures/monopoly/monofr.htm) With this shift of interest De Beers invested heavily on advertisement. “De Beers, realizing that diamonds lagged other luxury goods in advertising expenditure, raised its 2002 advertising budget to almost $200 million. In addition, De Beers leveraged an additional $150 million of diamond advertising from its customers (Kaplan B. 2003)”. This raised the annual total cost while reducing the marginal cost of selling due to increased advertisement. This definitely increased the overall demands in the diamonds and the selling quantities increased. After losing control over monopoly their monopoly prices decreases. But at the same time their market share increased tremendously. 4. Celebrity Association and product placement has been an important tool especially for the marketers of luxury goods. Same is the case with Diamonds. Celebrities are our role models in one way or other. Most of us are inspired by their personality and we try to copy one or many aspects as how the dress up, what the wear, their hairstyles their accessories etc. Especially in case of women the celebrity association is effective for both men and women in the target audience. Celebrities like Madonna, Michael Jackson, Tom Cruise, Nicole Kidman and many others have been famous to endorse products. And their endorsement increased the demands tremendously for the associated products. De Beers also utilized the technique of product placement. As reported in publicity section at their website:Adiamondisforever.com, there are numerous events which they organized to launch their campaigns like Right hand ring launch, Design your ring launch and launch of an advertisement ‘Steps’. They have successfully endorsed their product with celebrities like Halle Berry in the movie ‘catwomen’. Moreover Nicole Kidman wore a 195 carat diamond necklace in 2004’s Annual Academy Awards. They have also associated celebrities in MTV’s video music awards of 2004 with diamonds. So this kind of linkage has always been a useful way for marketers to inspire their target market by associating their celebrity of choice with the brand (Publicity, 2007). Bibliography Adiamondisforever (2006). Journey Diamond Jewelry. Retrieved on January 30, 2007: http://journey.adiamondisforever.com/ asadvertised, (2007). Advertised Diamond Jewelry. Retrieved on January 30, 2007: http://adiamondisforever.com/hot/asadvertised.html Kaplan B., (2003). Forever Diamonds. Retrieved on January 30, 2007: http://www.gemeducation.com/forever_diamonds_4.htm Ottum R. (2006). De beers Diamond Journey. Retrieved on January 30, 2007: http://www.marketingblurb.com/2006/08/de_beers_diamond_journey.html Publicity, (2007). Publicity Events. Retrieved on January 30, 2007: http://www.adiamondisforever.com/who/events.html Stein N. (2001). The De Beers Story: A New Cut On An Old Monopoly The company That Has Ruled Diamonds For a Century Wants To Polish Its Image… And Dominates As Never Before. Retrieved on January 30, 2007: http://money.cnn.com/magazines/fortune/fortune_archive/2001/02/19/296863/index.htm Vranica S. (2006). De beers begins ‘Journey’ for New Diamond Style. Retrieved on January 30, 2007: http://www.moneyweb.co.za/shares/international_news/941211.htm Read More