The diamond industry is falling short when it comes to category marketing, leading figures said in Antwerp Tuesday, calling for every member of the trade to play a role in promoting the natural product.
While today’s diamantaires benefited from past generations’ category marketing, “as an industry — and I would include De Beers in this — we’ve taken that for granted too much,” De Beers CEO Al Cook told an audience at the Facets 2024 conference.
Cook, in conversation with diamond analyst Edahn Golan, said his company would take its leadership role seriously, but the industry cannot leave the job of promoting diamonds to De Beers and Botswana.
“We need everyone to step up,” he insisted. “We need everyone to play their role in talking about natural diamonds, in marketing natural diamonds.”
This includes “paying our bit toward diamond marketing,” Cook, added — hinting at efforts to collect funding for the Natural Diamond Council (NDC) from the midstream. It also means ensuring the sector has the highest standards of sustainability, transparency and ethics “from the moment the diamond is pulled out of the ground to the moment it is sold.”
‘Blown it’
The danger of neglecting natural-diamond marketing was a central theme at the conference in Belgium, which attracted more than 500 attendees from around the world. Executives lamented the absence of category promotion in the 15 years since De Beers stopped doing this.
Since then, there has been a lack of funding, a problem that worsened when Alrosa left the NDC at the onset of the Russia-Ukraine war, stripping the organization of half its cash input.
“No one sees the value in marketing until you take it away,” David Kellie, CEO of the NDC, stressed at a panel on unlocking the value of natural diamonds.
The industry has wasted a great opportunity to flourish over the past decade, which has seen a reduction in diamond production, growth of the middle classes, and a luxury boom, Kellie continued.
“We should all be sitting around here with our Porsches, Ferraris [and] Lamborghinis all lined up outside,” he argued. “We have blown this as an industry, and we are going to blow it again if we don’t sit down and say we have to invest.”
If decision-makers at multi-generational diamond companies don’t believe that marketing can turn this situation around, “then I would say leave it to the next generation,” Kellie said. “I think the next generation has got more passion and desire and understanding to be able to do that.”
He also congratulated Antwerp, Dubai and India for launching discussions over an industry marketing fund.
Positive holiday
In the shorter term, De Beers is “positively surprised” by holiday retail sales so far, Cook said. He cited data from Tenoris showing that US jewelry revenues rose 7.4% year on year in October, as well as figures from The Edge Retail Academy showing a 15% year-on-year increase in gross sales at US independent jewelers.
Meanwhile, since Donald Trump’s election as US president, the S&P 500 stock index is up around 5%, he noted. “So the people who would be buying diamonds [and] would be buying jewelry through this holiday period are on average 5% wealthier than they were prior to the elections. So we’re seeing the sign of a holiday season that will probably be above the expectations that we at De Beers had.”
India’s domestic jewelry market has also been strong, leaving China as the “black spot,” the executive added.
The first day of Facets 2024 took place at the Handelsbeurs, with new Botswana President Duma Boko addressing the crowd. The event continues Wednesday at the Diamond Club of Antwerp.
Image: Al Cook and Edahn Golan at the Facets conference in Belgium. (AWDC)
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