The diamond engagement ring was a marketing ploy (and a huge success)

If you’re a girl who has ever dreamily imagined what her diamond ring might look like one day (or a boy who has tenderly thought of saving up for one in the future), you’re a huge sucker and you didn’t even know it.

Before the 1940s, proposals were made with a gold or silver ring – maybe even *gasp* a ruby or an emerald. It wasn’t until the diamond mining and trading giant De Beers brought the New York-based advertising agency N.W. Ayer on board that diamond engagement rings really kicked off. The prices of diamonds were dropping, and De Beers needed to act fast.

Ayer calculatedly and deliberately (as all marketing is done) drilled it into the minds of American men and women that the diamond was the truest and only testament of love and devotion. The agency got newspapers and magazines to print stories about the sizes of celebrities’ diamond rings. They had fashion designers speak on talk shows about how diamonds were the newest and hottest trend. Ayer even planned a lecture series that travelled around the country visiting high schools to subtly spread this idea of a diamond engagement ring to impressionable pansies daydreaming in auditoriums.

1960 De Beers ad in Reader's Digest (SensaiAlan/Flickr)

Before long, men were convinced that their love, and even their own personal success, corresponded with the size of the diamond they purchased. In women’s minds, diamonds were intrinsically tied to romance, love and commitment. Basically, De Beers won and now you’d be hard-pressed to find a newly engaged 20-something-year-old woman not sporting a diamond ring on her left hand.

What I find to be the most exceptional (other than the fact that we’re all suckers) is the fact that Ayer didn’t exactly advertise diamonds, or De Beers, for that matter. They advertised the experience and the idea. Ayer marketed the dream of a socialite with a fat rock on her ring finger at some fabulous gala. They came up with the phrase “A diamond is forever,” even though they’re anything but (chips, scratches, cracks, and the fact that they can literally be turned to vapor). 

This is the kind of marketing that really works. Apple doesn’t make the best performing products in the tech industry – and not by a long shot, if you ask anyone who cares enough to find out who does. But I certainly don’t care, because what’s better than that silky, spaceship-like, sucking sensation of opening a box with a new iPhone inside? Nothing.

Source: The Atlantic