The instinctive response of most analysts to the current woes of the diamond industry is that there has been a dire lack of marketing. But is this true? And, if it is, how difficult will it be for the new owners of De Beers to turn its once awesome marketing ship around?
De Beers is a legend in the world of marketing, having famously convinced first Americans and then Asians and then almost everybody around the world that romantic love could not be complete without a diamond gift. The slogan was “A diamond is forever”, but the real genius was linking one of the most instinctive human desires – to find and keep a partner – with a product dug out of the ground.
The line was devised in 1947 by Frances Gerety, a young copywriter at the Philadelphia agency NW Ayer. De Beers itself describes it, with some justification, as the greatest advertising tagline of the 20th century.
The genius went much further than four words. De Beers did not merely advertise diamonds; it created social rules around them. Diamonds were for engagements. The stone should cost a meaningful proportion of a man’s income. It should never be sold, because love should never be sold. Anniversaries required more diamonds.
If romantic attachment is one of humanity’s oldest instincts, De Beers found a way to put a price tag on it.
Restore the advertising, restore the price
More recently, however, the marketing of natural diamonds has become thinner and less coherent, and critics tend to blame De Beers’ mining-house owner, Anglo American, with its own and very different issues, for taking its eye off this crucial ball. The theory is enticingly simple: demand weakened because the industry stopped telling consumers why diamonds matter. Restore the advertising, restore the desire, restore the price.
There is something in this argument. De Beers’ last clearly disclosed large annual marketing number was in 2017, when it spent more than $140m, 19% more than the previous year and its largest commitment since 2008. The expenditure covered a combination of De Beers’ proprietary brands and partnerships in the US, China and India.
That sounded like a great deal of money at the time. But comparatively, in the luxury industry generally, it is not.
Luxury goods group LVMH spent €4.24bn on advertising and promotion in 2016, equivalent to about 11% of revenue. The figure included media campaigns, point-of-sale advertising and personnel devoted to marketing. Richemont, the owner of Cartier and Van Cleef & Arpels, spent €1.09bn on “communication” in the year to March 2016, or just under 10% of sales.
The arms race has not slowed. Richemont spent almost €2bn on communication in its latest financial year, still 8.9% of sales. LVMH’s advertising and promotion expenses amounted to 11.5% of revenue in 2024 – nearly €10bn on the group’s €84.7bn turnover.
The comparison is imperfect: LVMH sells handbags, perfume, champagne, jewellery and an assortment of other objects designed to make their owners feel that life has turned out rather well.
The free-rider issue
But while the advertising battlefield has become much larger, De Beers’ ability to finance the battle has become much smaller.
The company recorded revenue of $3.5bn in 2025, including $3bn from rough diamonds, but suffered an underlying earnings before interest, tax, depreciation and amortisation loss of $511m. Its average realised rough-diamond price declined 7%, while its rough-price index, including the effect of inventory sold at discounted prices, was effectively down about 25%. Anglo took another $2.3bn impairment against De Beers.
The deterioration continued into the first quarter of 2026, when the average realised price fell another 19% to $101 a carat. De Beers has now announced a two-year pause at Venetia, its flagship South African mine, as it cuts expenditure and waits for conditions to improve.
This presents the prospective owners with an almost comically unpleasant corporate-finance question: how much money should a loss-making company spend persuading people to buy a product whose price is still falling?
There is a second, deeper difficulty. In its heyday, De Beers could justify advertising diamonds generically because it controlled most of the diamonds that would ultimately be sold. Today, advertising “natural diamonds” benefits competitors as much as it benefits De Beers.
Mining analyst Peter Major says this has become one of the company’s central problems.
“We have to find a way that we’re promoting De Beers diamonds, not Russian diamonds, not Canadian diamonds,” he says.
“When you control 70% or 80%, you say, ‘I’ll pay for everybody,’ because you’re getting the most benefit out of it. But that’s not the case now.”
This is the free-rider problem dressed in evening wear. “To me, it’s never been harder running De Beers,” Major says.
His answer is that De Beers must increasingly market not only natural diamonds, but De Beers natural diamonds. That means traceability, provenance and some identifiable guarantee that allows consumers to distinguish a De Beers stone from Russian production, another African producer or an anonymous stone that has passed through the global cutting and trading system.
Major suggests the company may need to go further in marking or branding individual stones and telling consumers what their purchase supports: mining communities, employment, infrastructure and development in producer countries.
“They are going to have to cater to a part of the market that has money, that wants a De Beers diamond, not another diamond,” he says. The complication is that the historical prestige on which De Beers has traded is fading as older consumers move on and younger buyers form different views about luxury, marriage and value.
Getting back on the marketing bus
The company has also returned to large-scale category advertising. Its Desert Diamonds campaign, created by Arnold Worldwide, is De Beers’ first new “beacon” campaign in more than a decade. It takes diamonds with warmer, previously less fashionable shades – sand, honey, ochre and brown – and presents their natural colour variations as evidence of individuality rather than imperfection.
The ad campaign is actually stunning. The ads are magnificent, and it’s a shrewd piece of marketing because it does more than encourage consumers to buy diamonds. It potentially persuades them to pay more for parts of miners’ production that have traditionally been harder to sell.
De Beers says the campaign has been backed by the industry’s largest marketing budget in 15 years. It claims sales of natural diamonds at participating US independent jewellers rose 4% in the final quarter of 2025 and 9% in the first quarter of 2026. Sales of the K-to-Z coloured stones promoted by Desert Diamonds rose by 15% and 19% respectively.
Those are encouraging numbers, though they are company-supplied and do not prove that advertising alone caused the improvement. The strongest sales growth has also been concentrated in larger and higher-quality diamonds, while the lower end remains under pressure.
Shifting the dial
Former De Beers CEO Bruce Cleaver, who had considered bidding for the business but has now withdrawn, remains a believer in the long-term future of diamonds. But Cleaver says the broader luxury environment remains difficult, and one of the problems is the question of just how much you would have to spend on marketing to shift the dial.
“In the old days the mantra used to be that if you spend $200m a year – which is not nothing, for the record – you’d be able to move the dial. If you look at the total advertising spend in the luxury space over the past 20 years, it’s gone up a lot,” he says.
“$200m as a percentage of the total is now really quite small. So you’ve gotta ask yourself, is that enough? And then you have to ask, can the business generate $200m of free cash flow at the moment anyway to spend on advertising.”
Anglo has reportedly selected the Global Diamond Consortium, led by another former De Beers CEO, Gareth Penny, as its preferred bidder, though Botswana is still considering whether to join the transaction, exercise its pre-emption rights or pursue another structure. No final sale has yet been completed.
Whoever eventually takes control will therefore inherit more than mines and diamond stocks. They will inherit a collective-action problem.
The new owners will have to persuade producing governments, miners, cutters and retailers to contribute meaningfully to category marketing. They will have to spend enough to be noticed in a luxury market where the leading groups spend billions. At the same time, they must ensure that the benefit flows disproportionately towards De Beers through branding, traceability and provenance.
So, has diamond marketing been inadequate? Almost certainly. But the deeper answer is that the old De Beers marketing machine depended on an industry structure that no longer exists.
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