A jewellery exhibition is the most useful event for the diamond industry, which you can think of. Not only because jewelers here can show their goods to a huge number of people all in one breath raking in a three-month sales proceeds within a week. It is also a unique opportunity for all of us to become better acquainted with end users.
I spent the whole day in the halls of the Moscow JUNWEX jewelry show – a small event on a global scale, but the largest in Russia - in order to understand one simple truth: while experts on the diamond pipeline cross their swords in an attempt to prove the necessity of the Kimberley Process and the importance of protecting consumers against "unethical" diamonds, those consumers know about it abso-blessed-lutely nothing.
Of the 50 surveyed persons who came to the exhibition to buy diamond jewelry, only 5 gave affirmative answers to the question, "Is it important for you to know the origin of diamonds in this jewelry piece?" These 50 included 42 women and 8 men aged from 19 to about 60. Some of them were ready to spend up to 150,000 rubles ($5000) on diamond jewelry on that day, although most of them estimated the affordable purchase price at $1,000.
With those five, who considered the origin of diamonds to be important, not everything was sleek either. “Blood diamonds” in this context were recalled by one woman who saw something nasty in a Hollywood movie about Africa. Perhaps, in this context Leonardo DiCaprio has done more for the Kimberley Process than many clashes of experts in newspaper columns. The other four being asked clarification-seeking questions said "the main thing for them was to get real diamonds." Synthetic stones scare the mass consumer much stronger than potential human rights violations during mining for natural gems. It is not that they do not care about the fate of workers in Africa – it is just because African workers are infinitely far away to make a jewelry buyer leap to any conclusions about whether someone's rights were violated - but the sale of synthetic diamonds under the guise of natural diamonds violates their consumer rights here and now.
Let me remind you that this kind of consciousness was demonstrated only by 10% of those who were willing to spend rather hefty amounts from their personal or family budgets on diamonds that day. However, the majority of them candidly admitted they did not understand anything about diamonds, so for them it would be enough if a jewelry piece was just beautiful. Moreover, many of the female respondents said expensive jewelry was bought for them by men, and in this case even design plays a lesser role than the attention displayed by beloved men. The system built by De Beers one hundred years ago is still working: a diamond ring is considered to be an extremely convincing proof of love. And it does not matter where and how it came from.
Of course, there were sophisticated buyers as well. Those, who believed that the most important thing was where a diamond was cut. "You will never reliably know where and how a diamond was mined,” they said. “But if it was cut in Israel, it is definitely good - they have traditions there!" Incidentally, these buyers still consider Israel to be the largest diamond cutting center in the world, and the news that 90% of the world's diamonds are now cut in India was seen as a bad joke.
The Russian consumption market for diamond jewelry is extremely small: Russia is not even displayed as a separate item on the charts in the Bain reports. According to the Discovery Research Group, the entire jewelry market in Russia in 2012 amounted to some $ 9 billion, but diamond jewelry is unlikely to cover more than 40%. Nevertheless, it is a market and on the whole consumers there are the same.
You may argue that the problem of diamond origin is most certainly much more perturbing the minds of consumers from the premium segment, who are unlikely to visit crowded exhibitions, preferring quiet and respectable branded boutiques. However, according to Bain reports, small-scale networks and non-chain stores accounted for 80% of global diamond jewelry sales. It is the unsophisticated consumer that brings 80% of revenue to the diamond pipeline, so his/hers view is definitely worth considering.
From a global perspective, about fifty visitors from those attending the Moscow exhibition are not the right kind of sampling. For the integrity of this survey it would be worth to interview at least a thousand people at each major exhibition in every part of the world. But even the above results may encourage all of us to wonder whether we speak one language with our customers, whether we are correct in understanding their needs and whether our marketing is following the right path. Because so far, it seems that most of the topics discussed by diamond experts are just an opportunity for the members of the "club" to argue with each other.
Elena Levina for Rough&Polished
