Precious diamonds, synonymous with love, commitment and loyalty, are set in more than 90% of engagement rings and other jewelry, and people spend hundreds of billions of dollars a year on diamonds.
But this is actually a recent phenomenon, the essence of diamonds, like coal, is everywhere on the earth, and the reason why diamonds are so expensive is entirely because of the marketing fools and clever operations of diamond capitalists in history.
Today, let's talk about diamonds, the most successful marketing scam in history, the most profitable monopoly cartel.
Let's play a cross-over game, if you travel back 100 years to the 1920s, your name is Ernest Oppenheimer, and you run a diamond company called De Beers.
Diamonds were so valuable at the time that craftsmen used it to produce the finest jewelry of the time, and its industrial use was irreplaceable by other materials.
So people all over the world are willing to pay a high price for it, and the best quality diamonds can even sell for $100,000 a carat.
And you monopolized all the diamond mines in South Africa, which was the world's largest diamond producer at the time, and eventually 90% of the world's diamonds came from your company.
So you can say that you were the king of diamonds at that time, and you felt that you could completely use diamonds to dominate the whole world.
But you also have a crisis: there is a problem with the supply of diamonds.
Originally only India and Brazil produced diamonds, and everyone thought diamonds were rare, so diamonds were very valuable, and the price even exceeded that of gold.
But just as overnight, diamonds were dug up in many parts of Africa, and it was easier for Africans to dig out diamonds in the field than to grow crops.
You've dug up a lot of diamonds yourself, and if you put them all on the market, the price will definitely plummet and you'll lose tens of billions in vain.
You certainly don't want that to happen.
So you need to transform, the previous business model is to increase diamond production as much as possible, and the future business model is to reduce diamond production as much as possible.
In addition, I want the diamond market to run smoothly and continue to earn huge profits. It is necessary to let people not know how much this stone they buy at a high price is worth.
Although the essence of diamonds is carbon atoms, no different from coal, there is carbon everywhere in the world.
But you want people to think from the bottom of their hearts that a diamond is a very rare and extremely valuable gemstone.
If this plan is completed, the diamond industry, where you make a fortune in your own muffled voice, will become the most successful marketing scam and the most profitable monopoly cartel in history.
When you think of the word cartel, you might think of the typical drug cartel.
But cartels are common, and they refer to organizations that band together to fix the price of a product so that all members can make a decent profit.
For example, some oil-producing countries have united to form an oil cartel: OPEC. They control the production of oil, and thus the price of oil, and finally those countries can make the world's money together.
You also have to build diamond cartels, because the more diamonds the market supplies, the lower the price people are willing to pay for them.
But if you can control all the diamond suppliers, then you can decide how many diamonds enter the market, and thus the price of the diamonds.
The first step in controlling the supply of diamonds was to buy all the companies in Africa that wanted to mine diamonds at the time, starting at the source.
Once these people find that diamonds are very profitable, they will start trading diamonds themselves and then smuggling them around you.
So do everything you can to suppress them, such as using the term unlicensed to rectify them, saying that they are criminals or underworld or something.
Because Africa was lawless at the time, you could hire private detectives to get intelligence from the illegal dealings of these "criminals."
Then kidnapping, interrogation, beatings, and even the use of armed forces to physically make them disappear physically.
These methods are fair and reasonable, and fully conform to the jungle rules of capitalism.
By taking full advantage of the rules of the game, you're in control of the supply chain. It's time to move on to the next step.
As a qualified cartel, it is very important to ensure that the merchant is obedient enough.
Because you control 90% of the world's diamond supply, merchants who want to buy can only go to you
Who can buy diamonds, how many diamonds can they buy, and what quality diamonds can they buy? It's up to you.
Then to create a kind of franchise aura, you create a club with only 200 merchants who can buy goods directly from you, and you call them franchisees.
These franchisees are an important cornerstone of your control of the entire market. They'll meet you once a month from all over the world, buy them from you, and then the whole world buys diamonds from these 200 franchisees
In fact, they run so far and wide, and finally can earn 3 achievements are good, so they still have to look at your face, in your opinion, they are kneeling for food, just how many people want to kneel and do not have this door. Make money, business, don't shiver.
Fast forward to the 1930s and you'll make more money than ever before. But your biggest potential market, the U.S. market, didn't perform well, and Americans didn't care much about diamonds at the time, and diamond sales were low.
So you have to cultivate American diamond consumption habits, which has to convince Americans that diamonds are priceless.
So the problem is, at the time, diamonds were just a luxury that made jewelry more beautiful, a luxury that rich people could afford, so if you wanted to make more money, you had to make people think that diamonds were not the luxury of rich people, but a necessity for everyone.
How do you do that?
If you can make diamonds represent love in the eyes of the public, so that people feel that no matter how poor a man is, the ultimate gesture he can show love to women is to buy the other party the largest diamond he can buy, then this problem is perfectly solved.
In fact, people are very susceptible to the influence of movie stars, and they worship those who lead the way.
With that in mind, you opened an office in Hollywood and started trying to make some influential friends. You give the most valuable diamonds to the producers in exchange for them to market diamonds in the movie, which is a very innovative marketing method.
Then the public saw that the man in the movie used diamonds as the ultimate symbol of love commitment, and also used diamonds to surprise his lover.
Invisibly, people began to subconsciously associate diamonds with symbols of love.
In addition, when top movie stars appear in the public eye, make sure they are all wearing diamond jewelry, which is also a very effective publicity for diamonds.
In the end, as you wish, the diamond became a typical symbol of love, and this concept was deeply rooted in people's hearts.
But then you find another problem: some people start selling their diamonds to others.
If people do this, the demand for diamonds will be greatly reduced, and even you will not be able to sell new diamonds, which may destroy your business empire.
Just like dealing with diamond mines and merchants in Africa, you have to control the overall supply of diamonds, and you have to make people feel that they can't resell their diamonds and should always hold them.
So you find an advertising agency, and then there's the slogan "Diamond lasts forever, one lasts forever."
You instill in people through all kinds of ads:
Diamonds are very precious and unique, representing the only promise, men should always buy a diamond for every romantic milestone, throwing away your diamond is equivalent to throwing your other half's love in the trash, buying a second-hand diamond means that love is not pure.
Your genius marketing strategy works again, diamonds rarely appear in the second-hand market,
People think that diamonds are a girl's best friend, diamonds are eternal, and a man can only propose to a girl with a diamond ring.
Then the diamond culture slowly became so entrenched that people thought things had always been like this.
People don't know that diamond culture is the most successful marketing outcome in history, and they will still buy diamonds even if the truth about diamond marketing is exposed.
Like all perceived deceptions, both sides in a scam play an important role in deception, which is not a one-man show.
Well, after such a series of operations, your business empire is finally built.
Now you're in control of the supply and demand for diamonds and you're making countless bucks.
This will make some people blush and they will try to get a piece of it, so you need to be ruthless against competitors in the industry. The smuggling of diamonds must be kept to a minimum at all costs, after all, the stones are everywhere on the planet.
Plus, the more diamonds you control, the more workers you need. You can find some cheap labor in India, where children can work 12 hours a day for a 4-cent wage.
As long as you can maintain cold-blooded and ruthless control of the industry, you can sit back and relax and enjoy the fruits of the largest monopoly cartel in history.
Fast forward to today, de Beers, the diamond brand, has largely fallen out of favor.
Because more and more countries are starting to find their own diamond reserves.
After decades of putting up with diamond cartels, some countries, such as Russia, Canada and Australia, finally felt they had had enough and refused to cooperate with diamond cartels.
Laboratory-grown man-made diamonds have also matured, and they have been found to be almost identical in a variety of manifestations to naturally occurring diamonds, especially in China, where man-made diamonds now occupy an important position globally.
This has forced diamond cartels to shift from full control of supply to promoting their own diamond and retail store brands, which are still making money today, but they are a far cry from what they were decades ago.
What lessons or lessons does this teach us? Be wary of supply chain monopolies in some industries, such as some Internet companies now, as for which companies, you can share them in the comments
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