Forever? Or for as Long as an Enduring Connection Lasts with a Significant Other?
October 23, 24
I wonder what Frances Gerety would make of the new De Beers marketing campaign.
She was the copywriter who penned them the four-word slogan that transformed an industry: A diamond is forever.
Was she thinking - as De Beers currently is - about couples "prioritizing the importance of personal growth and investment in themselves before they feel ready to build strong, enduring connections with a significant other" back in 1947?
Or was she thinking, more practically, about how she could drive demand for diamonds in a post-Depression era for a client already in control of global supply?
Her campaign was the pivotal point that established a diamond (and only a diamond) as the inevitable conclusion to a young couple's courtship - at a time when one only one bride in 10 wore a diamond ring.
Fast forward almost eight decades to a very different world, as De Beers launches a new campaign.
The first thing to note, in an historical context, is that it's a collaboration with Signet, the world's biggest diamond retailer.
Gone are the days when De Beers enjoyed a virtual monopoly of diamonds, such that there was no need for a namecheck on their ads. Every diamond was a De Beers diamond.
The second thing is how the world has changed in those eight decades. The new campaign is called Worth the Wait, a reference to our personal journey - much like that of a diamond - through the heat and pressure of life until we're ready to settle down with "the one".
Back in the 1940s, an era when abstinence was the only guaranteed form of contraception, Worth the Wait would have had a very different connotation.
Homosexuality in the US was still a criminal offense at the time (Illinois became the first state to decriminalize it 1962).
And it wasn't until 1967 that interracial marriages became legal in every US state (Virginia was the last to repeal the ban).
Worth the Wait addresses a society today that is barely recognizable from that of 1947, yet one thing remains constant. Marketing diamonds isn't about marketing diamonds. It's about marketing an idea.
Frances Gerety knew that when she coined the tagline that will forever be a part of De Beers.
She wasn't selling a crystalline form of carbon with a tetrahedral atomic structure. She was selling a dream.
Likewise the new campaign, albeit with an emphasis on the challenges faced by Zillennials (30 to 35-year-olds) finding themselves, and then finding the right partner for an enduring connection, that would have left a 1940s audience somewhat bemused.
"Love. It starts with self-worth, because to find someone worthy of us, we must first be worthy ourselves." So begins the 90-second ad.
"So, we put in the work, to grow more and shape into the people we want to be, by being pressure-tested at every turn, by walking through the fire, as they say."
Very poetic, very "diamond journey".
And then one special person walks through that door. A person "who has also done the work to grow, morph and shape into the person they want to be, and together we feel the earth move." Another diamond journey reference or cheeky innuendo?
"We've become polished, the best version of ourselves," it goes on. The diamond matches the journey and the patience and resilience they've taken to find each other, that kind of thing.
Today's diamond story is a stark contrast to that of the 1940s, when it was all about size and status - how big a stone could the chap afford.
Equally, the dream is no longer about undying love, with the diamond as a symbol of permanence, the hardest substance known to man, as it was back in the day.
The natural diamond (emphasis on natural) now seems to represent a reward that is rightly ours for the persistence we show in refining ourselves and finding the right partner.
It's worth the wait because the other sort of diamonds are whipped up in a matter of days, not billions of years.
There's an awful lot to unpack about 80 years of social evolution in this carefully crafted narrative.
But Frances Gerety would probably approve. Much like "Worth the Wait", her "A diamond is forever" very much captured the mood of the moment, even if no man ever actually placed a diamond on her finger.
She died aged 83 in 1999, having never married.
Have a fabulous weekend.