Gareth Penny Urges Emotion-Led Diamond Marketing at CIBJO Congress
Rapaport reports on remarks by former De Beers chief executive Gareth Penny at the CIBJO Centenary Congress about how the natural-diamond trade should position itself. See the full article for his argument.
Read original on RapaportExecutive Summary
At an industry congress, a prominent former mining executive set out a case for how natural diamonds should be marketed to the next generation of buyers. His remarks address category strategy against lab-grown competition and are worth reading in full for anyone shaping brand or demand-generation plans.
Industry Impact
Calls to reframe how natural diamonds are sold tend to surface when the category is under pressure from lab-grown competition and shifting consumer priorities. From D-Loupe’s perspective, the practical issue is not only messaging, but also funding. Sustained, coordinated generic marketing has historically helped protect natural-diamond desirability, and its absence is felt most acutely by smaller polished goods that compete directly with lab-grown supply. A demand-led strategy also changes incentives across the chain, since miners, sightholders, and retailers each have different marketing capacity. Whether a repositioning effort succeeds depends less on the slogan itself than on who funds it and how consistently it reaches younger buyers.
Next Steps
- Review your current marketing-spend split between natural and lab-grown lines.
- Test emotion- and provenance-led messaging against price-led messaging in one channel.
- Track younger-buyer conversion separately from overall traffic.
- Assess how exposed your smaller-stone inventory is to lab-grown substitution.
- Watch for any industry-funded generic marketing initiative to align with or co-fund.