Word: diamond
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...effort to put some sparkle back into the diamond industry, De Beers has launched a heavy, worldwide advertising campaign. Even before the famous slogan "A diamond is forever" was coined in 1948, ads linking the polished stones with romance and marriage were routinely used to boost sales. Through publicity in Japanese magazines, for example, De Beers has helped create a market for diamonds where none had existed for 1,500 years. As Edward Jay Epstein points out in his book The Rise and Fall of Diamonds: the Shattering of a Brilliant Illusion, which was published last May, the percentage...
...this year, De Beers will spend $26 million on advertising, up 75% from 1980. The budget for television commercials alone has quadrupled, to $10 million. To spur sales of larger, more profitable stones, a new slogan has been created: "A diamond of a carat or more is only one in a million." For less affluent buyers, De Beers is urging American parents to give their teen-age daughters small, heart-shaped diamond jewelry "for those special occasions ... as only a parent...
While the price of diamond jewelry has remained relatively stable, the market for investment diamonds has collapsed because of speculation run amuck. In the late 1970s, dealers in Tel Aviv, one of the world's diamond-cutting centers, began buying bushels of stones on credit after the government subsidized interest rates at 6%. At the same time, global inflation was causing investors to dump paper assets like currency and stock, and buy tangible goods, particularly gold, real estate and gems. The cost of an investment-grade D-flawless diamond, which had risen from...
...young salesmen began marketing the gems as investments, not jewelry. Some of the new firms used hard-sell, boiler-room techniques. Customers buying a stone were given a certificate that theoretically verified its worth by attesting to its color and brilliance. The largest firm in the field was International Diamond Corp., which in its six years of existence sold 250,000 stones. IDC buyers received a promise that the firm would help resell the stones and were told that no customer had ever lost any money this...
...Diamonds turned out to be a poor investment, largely because they are hard to sell. Experts commonly disagree about the exact characteristics of a given stone, which means that price quotations can vary widely. Moreover, there is no ready resale market for diamonds. After buying stones at retail, individuals usually find that they can be sold back to jewelers and diamond dealers only at the wholesale price, which is normally 50%-or even less than 50%-of retail. Says William Goldberg, president of the Diamond Dealers Club, the leading U.S. diamond traders association: "Diamonds are like real estate. My home...