Rough patch — De Beers hopes US couples will find diamonds ‘Worth the Wait’

Frances Gerety, a copywriter for advertising agency NW Ayer & Son, coined the signature line, “A Diamond Is Forever”, for a client named De Beers in 1947.

Almost 80 years later, De Beers – facing an existential crisis in the face of a surge in demand for laboratory-grown diamonds and increasingly indifferent customers – has come up with a new marketing slogan: “Worth the Wait.”

The two slogans represent different historical eras and there are reasons to be sceptical that the new one will have the resonance of the “Forever” tag. But De Beers is betting that it will stoke flagging demand for its product at a time when it is demerging from its mother ship, Anglo American, slicing an umbilical cord that is more than a century old.

A diamond may be forever, but Anglo’s relationship to the commodity is pointedly not, as sales and profits for De Beers and other diamond producers tank. De Beers’s total rough diamond sales volumes fell 22% to 11.9 million carats in the first half of 2024 compared with the same period in 2023, a reflection of the challenges faced by it and the wider industry.

To wit, De Beers launched the “Worth the Wait” campaign on 15 October with Signet Jewelers, the world’s largest retailer of diamond jewellery.

This was described by De Beers as “a new natural diamond campaign focused on the themes of modern love and evolving relationship dynamics, targeted at soon-to-be-engaged zillennials”. Members of this microgeneration were born in the 1990s – a variation of South Africa’s “born-free” generation – but this campaign is explicitly targeting “a new generation of US couples”.



“A Diamond is Forever” was also largely targeted at US couples, and the generational divide is pretty stark. Gerety’s light-bulb moment flashed in the aftermath of the Great Depression and World War 2, just as the American economic giant was launching into orbit.

In the 1950s and 1960s, America’s working and middle classes experienced an unprecedented rise in living standards. Millions of households found themselves flush with disposable income for the first time, enabling the purchase of amenities that would have been beyond their parents’ wildest dreams of avarice.

Diamonds had long been a coveted luxury item associated with the rich and royalty. But with rising incomes and pent-up demand after the austerity imposed by war and depression, a diamond was something that even a blue-collar couple could afford. Along with the car, TV set and house in the suburbs, it was a sign that you had made it.

The slogan “A Diamond is Forever” also plugged into the marriage boom that produced the baby boom. Lots of people were getting married in the wake of the war, which had seen a literal army of men go overseas to fight and an army of women fill the factories in their absence.

De Beers’s marketing played on patriarchal notions of marriage, with a man on bended knee holding a diamond to propose to a woman who was returning to her “natural” domestic role in the house where they would happily live “forever”. It is the era that Donald Trump yearns for.

Will zillennials fall for it?

This story first appeared in our weekly Daily Maverick 168 newspaper, which is available countrywide for R35.