Fritinancy

A new tagline for De Beers

For the first time in its 135-year history, the giant diamond company De Beers has a “global ambassador.” And for the first tine in 75 years, it has a new tagline. Bye-bye, “A Diamond Is Forever,” hello “Where It Begins.”

Lupita Nyong’o in a full-page ad in Town and Country, February 2023

I take a look at the history of De Beers advertising in my latest story for Medium, “All That Glitters: Diamonds and the Cultivation of Desire” (friend link).

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Blog bonuses:

I first wrote about diamond advertising way back in 2008.

For an excellent overview of the worldwide diamond trade, I recommend The Heartless Stone by Tom Zoellner (2006), which remains relevant today. Thanks to Mike Pope for recommending it to me many years ago.

De Beers was founded in 1888 by the British capitalist and imperialist Cecil Rhodes, but unlike Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe and Zambia), Rhodes University, and the Rhodes Scholarship, the company isn’t named for him. Instead, it takes its name from two Dutch brothers named De Beer on whose South African farm diamonds were discovered. Rhodes, who had moved to South Africa in 1870. got his start in the diamond business by renting water to miners.

A Ro by Any Other Name

I usually can come up with a theory to explain copycat names and naming trends. In the early aughts, many companies chose double-O names (Qoop, Squidoo, Doostang, ooVoo) to sound like Google. All those X + Y names (Mizzen + Main, Standard & Strange, Coral & Tusk)? They evoke Ye Olde Tymes, with the modern bonus of yielding cheap domains. Lately, we’ve seen a cluster of first-name names like Oscar and Emma, the better to blunt the cutting edge of technology.

But the explanation for one mini-trend has eluded me. Perhaps you, dear readers, can help.

Name in the news: Draper James

There’s a curious little kerfuffle going on between two businesswomen whose flower-shaped logos are suspiciously similar in shape and embellishment. What makes it especially newsworthy is that one of the businesswomen is the actress Reese Witherspoon, and she’s the one being sued.

But that’s not the only thing I find interesting about Ms. Witherspoon’s retail venture, which is called Draper James, after the actress’s grandmother (Dorothea Draper) and grandfather (William James Witherspoon). For me, that name – no matter how sweetly familial – is all too reminiscent of another, much older retail chain, Draper’s & Damon’s.

August Linkfest

Media holding company Gannett’s new job descriptions for “the newsroom of the future” (“Content Coach,” “Engagement Editor,” et al.) are pretty close to self-parody. But that didn’t stop some anonymous wag—obviously very close to the machine—from creating a parody. Apply now to be a Bullshit Artist 1, Reduction in Force Synergy Coach, and other dream jobs.  (Via Romenesko.)

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“Avoid using areas or volumes when representing quantities” and other rules for data visualization, published by the U.S. Bureau of the Census … in 1915. (Via Ben Schmidt’s Sapping Attention blog.)

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Weird Al’s “Word Crimes” parody song got all the ink, but I got a bigger kick out of another of his new songs, “Mission Statement,” which would be a spoof of corporate buzzwords if the subject weren’t already spoofproof. Watch the video and read about how TruScribe, a “video-scribing” company in Wisconsin, created the catchy and effective graphics. I learned about TruScribe via a Wall Street Journal blog post about the Yankovic video. One commenter wrote: “The beautiful part of this is that I can watch it at work with my headphones on and to anyone passing by it looks like I’m just watching some motivational business video.”

 

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Remember the Toyota “Swagger Wagon” ads? (Actually, there’s a new one.) “White-guy rapvertising is never going out of style,” declares AdFreak. Proof: this new video for webinar platform On24. Sample lyric: “Just look at your core competencies and extend your brand/Drive your penetration, and then you’ll be the man.”

 

“Get your webinar on.” 

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“The tale of ‘scofflaw,’ born in Boston at a time when Prohibitionists were staging mock funerals of ‘John Barleycorn’ and fleets of Coast Guard rum-chasers patrolled Boston Harbor, shows that sometimes real words can actually be invented on demand. They just don’t always behave exactly the way their engineers hope they will.” (Boston Globe, via @ammonshea.) I wrote about “scofflaw” in a 2011 blog post. More on the language of Prohibition in this 2010 post.

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Speaking of (and to) Ammon Shea, the Oxford University Press had 10 questions for the author of Bad English and Reading the OED.

 

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How advertisers used World War 1 to sell, sell, sell. (The Atlantic.)

“The cussed Huns have got my gramophone.” Via The Atlantic.

 

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XBMC, makers of media-center software—the initialism originally stood for Xbox Media Center—recently changed its name to Kodi. From legal and branding perspectives, it was a smart move. But many customers took to the comments section of the company’s blog to protest vehemently.

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Jewelry designer Wendy Brandes made a necklace. Literally.

“If you buy this, I guarantee you will literally enjoy the shit out of it.” – Wendy Brandes

 

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Color, value, and the evolution of logos. (The Trademark Blog.)

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How some of the world’s most famous restaurants—including Le Bernardin, Per Se, and Chez Panisse—got their names. (Via @socialdiner.)

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Stanford linguist Dan Jurafsky—whose new book, The Language of Food: A Linguist Reads the Menu, comes out in September—takes a close look at the words we use for tea: “These tea words (‘tea’, ‘cha’, ‘chai’, ‘matcha’, ‘laphet’) are players in an unusual linguistic story, in which two differing pronunciations of a word reflect the two ways that Europe and Asia have traded over the last 500 years: by land or by sea.”

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Anne Curzan on how Iron Dome, the Israeli anti-missile system, got its name:

[T]he project leader’s initial idea was straightforward: the Anti-Qassam, referring to the type of missiles most commonly fired by Hamas. When that was rejected as “problematic,” he and his wife came up with Golden Dome, an image that brings to mind the palaces of Kubla Khan or perhaps (closer to home) the Dome of the Rock in Jerusalem. That name was rejected as being too ostentatious, so under the pressure of time, gold was reduced to a lesser metal, and Iron Dome was born.

February Linkfest

Does something called VerMints belong in your mouth? Jessica Stone Levy thinks not.

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“The meaning of love in your dictionary is wrong. The meaning of love is the Jonas Brothers”: and other reader submissions to the online Merriam-Webster Dictionary, compiled by M-W lexicographer Kory Stamper.

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Why nauseating diamond ads are here to stay. Gretchen Gavett’s article for the Harvard Business Review includes this boggling tidbit: Tiffany has had a lock on the top right corner of Page 3 in the New York Times for more than 100 years. (More on diamond marketing here.)

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When words collide: Neal Whitman considers the “neat linguistic trick” that produces the movie title A Good Day to Die Hard, the portmanteaus netiquette and spork, and the expression sweet tooth fairy.

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Designer Ben Pieratt has created a “brand in a box”—name, logo, URL, social-media accounts, website theme, and more—that he’s selling for $18,000. It’s up to the buyer to choose how to use it. The brand’s name is Hessian, which Pieratt says he chose to honor Richard Hess, an advertising art director who died in 1991. Until I learned that, I assumed it had something to do with the German mercenary soldiers who fought on the British side in the American Revolution, or possibly a type of coarse woven cloth. The domain included in Pieratt’s brand package is dot-tv, which may be a deal-breaker for potential buyers. Read more at AdFreak.

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At the New Yorker blog Culture Desk, a gallery of weird stock photography from DIS Magazine, accompanied by an interview with DIS.

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“To us, the unicorn symbolizes the never-ending quest for mastery”: a Tumblr of the absurd, pretentious, and just plain daffy things branding agencies say about themselves, from the understandably anonymous Agency Wank.

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In a similar vein: Design Jargon Bullshit, ripped from actual websites. Sample: “We designed a series of bubbles that represented both the idea of the consumer as having options and the letter ‘o’.”

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An unofficial campaign to change the Kentucky state motto from “Unbridled Spirit” to “Kentucky Kicks Ass” has more than 12,000 Facebook “likes.” “We certainly would not sanction or endorse that phraseology,” sniffed a state tourism department spokesman. Better buy the T-shirt now. (Via Patrick Cox.) (More ass news here.)

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I’m betting some of the people who admired the “So God Made a Farmer” spot for Dodge Ram that aired during the Super Bowl had never heard of Paul Harvey, the right-wing radio broadcaster (1918-2009) who provided the soundtrack. (Harvey is credited with coining “Reaganomics,” “skyjack,” and “guesstimate”; he supported Sen. Joseph McCarthy in the 1950s and opposed school busing in the 1960s, but eventually opposed the Vietnam War and supported abortion rights.) It didn’t take long for GMaF parodies to appear. Here’s God Made a Factory Farmer, God Made a Realtor, God Made a Gay Man, and God Created Transit. And here’s some background on the Dodge ad. (This just in! So God Made a Banker, via MJF.)

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I’ll wrap this up with something substantial: “102 Spectacular Nonfiction Stories from 2012,” selected by Conor Friedersdorf and presented in alphabetical order by author’s last name. Not only does the list contain a whole bunch of articles I missed last year, it includes several publications I’d never heard of, like Idle Words and Defunct. I’m looking forward to getting acquainted.

Word of the Week: Drusy

Drusy: A crust of small crystals lining the sides of a cavity (or vug*) in a rock. Sometimes spelled druzy. Borrowed in the late 18th century from German druse, “weathered ore.”

According to an eHow entry on “drusy quartz”:

Drusy gems form naturally over millions of years. They are found on host materials such as agate or other minerals and are usually found when mining for other semiprecious gems, such as garnets and peridots. …

[Drusy] is recommended for pendants, brooches or earrings and does not hold up well to the wear and tear a ring or bracelet might receive.

Pendant with drusy and lapis lazuli from Bernadine Fine Art Jewelry.

Nevertheless, some jewelers do use drusy for bracelets:

Gold drusy bracelet from Etsy seller Frosted Willow.

And for rings:

Uvarovite drusy ring from Melissa Joy Manning. Uvarovite, a type of garnet, was named after Count Sergei Semenovitch Uvarov (1765-1855), a Russian statesman and amateur mineral collector.

Drusy jewelry has become popular only recently, according to the website of gemologist Barbara Smigel: “Until about 10 years ago, drusy minerals were little more than a curiosity, of interest to serious mineralogists, but unnoticed by jewelry designers, gem collectors, and the general public.” Drusy’s appeal, writes Spigel, “is easy to understand with its multitude of tiny crystals providing a reflective surface reminiscent of sugar or snow.”

Druse is also a botanical term referring to a rounded cluster of calcium oxalate crystals found in some plant cells. In ophthalmology, drusen (the German plural of druse) are tiny extracellular accumulations in the eye associated with aging and macular degeneration.

Thanks to Lisa of the Privilege blog, who introduced me to drusy with her link to the work of jeweler Rachel Pfeffer.

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* One of my favorite Scrabble words.

Word of the Week: Strass

Strass: A hard, brilliant, lead-containing glass used in making artificial gems. Also called “paste” or “diamante.”

Sources agree that “strass” was named for its inventor, but not on who he was. The OED and Encyclopedia Britannica identify him as Josef Strasser, an 18th-century Viennese goldsmith. Wikipedia doesn’t mention Josef: it claims strass was named for an 18th-century Alsatian jeweler, Georg Friedrich Strass. Maybe both Strass and Strasser solved the problem simultaneously. In any case, the eponym is satisfyingly apt: Strasse means “street” in German, and strass is often used to create a pavé (paved) effect.

“Strass” (or French “stras”) has long been used in Europe to describe artificial gemstones, but its more-recent popularity in the United States appears to be linked to shoe designer Christian Louboutin, whose crystal-paved pumps—which can cost north of $3,000 a pair—have been a red-carpet sensation. Accordingly to the official Louboutin Twitter account, the designer has created a pump that’s strassed all over—even on the famous red sole.

I try to stay up-to-date on such things, but I admit that “strass” was new to me until I read a post by Dustbury about pavé women’s pumps from the shouty shoe brand HERSTAR that celebrate professional sports teams. Here’s the Los Angeles Lakers edition:

Yours for less than 10 percent of the cost of the Loubies!

The copy is as ostentatious as the ornamentation (punctuation sic):

Encrusted, dazzling, and intensely mesmerizing with every step, these elite pumps command a presence of their own. Fully hand strassed in luxurious, hand selected Middle Eastern crystals, then offset by a sky-high 6” heel and 3" internal platform; these glittering heels glisten on the court and off. They are simply magical to behold.

And that is how I learned that “strass” can also be a verb.

Other examples from around the Internet:

“I strassed my own wedding shoes using genuine swarovski crystals and saved a TON of money.” (Wedding Wire)

“Here are final pics and video of Emily’s Lady Peeps painted a custom color then strassed in crystal AB Swarovski rhinestones.” (Urban Bling)

“Sophie and Ava’s strassing service is perfect for the doll who wants a lot of bling for a lot less money than it would cost for the retail price!” (Shatterproof Glass Dolls)

The “strass” category on Etsy depicts some non-footwear options, too.

Early artificial diamonds were rock crystals gathered from the Rhine River. But “rhinestone” to describe those crystals or their imitations postdates “strass” by half a century: the first appearance of “strass” in an English-language publication was in 1820, while “rhinestone” didn’t appear until 1871. (The German Rheinkiessel, or “Rhein pebble,” first appeared around 1780.)

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Urban Dictionary has a different definition for “strass”: “Stress that is so annoying that it’s a huge pain in the ass.” Which, admittedly, might result from wearing a pair of six-inch stilettos.

 

Names in the News: Kwiat

David S. Kwiat, former president of the Kwiat jewelry company, died August 9 at the age of 94. According to his obituary on the Kwiat blog, Mr. Kwiat was “an icon in the diamond industry and will be long remembered for his sharp mind, his love of diamonds and his reputation for integrity. …His clients included many of the world’s preeminent diamantaires and retail jewelers, including Harry Winston, as well as many in New York’s high society.”

I was interested in that word diamantaire, a French word that may mean “a professional in the diamond business,” “one who buys or sells diamonds,” or “a master diamond cutter.” But I was even more interested in the Kwiat name, which I’d seen in advertisements and in what-the-celebrities-are-wearing stories in magazines such as InStyle, but which was otherwise something of a mystery to me.

I hadn’t known, for example, that “Kwiat” was an eponym just like Shreve (a Bay Area institution) or Tiffany. I’d never encountered anyone with the Kwiat surname, and I wasn’t sure how to pronounce the name. (It’s KWEE-aht, according to “How Do You Say Kwiat?” on the company website.)

Here’s what Ancestry.com says about “Kwiat”:

Polish and Jewish (from Poland): from Polish kwiat ‘flower’, a metonymic occupational name for a florist or a gardener. As a Jewish name, this is generally of ornamental origin.

The Polish pronunciation would be closer to KVEE-aht.

“Kwiat” is a rare surname in the United States—the Ancestry.com map, taken from U.S. Census records, shows only a handful of Kwiats, most of them east of the Mississippi. But that’s a misleading picture, because “Kwiat” sometimes changed its spelling. Abel Kiviat, for example, a silver medalist in track and field at the 1912 Olympic Games in Stockholm, was the son of Moishe Kwiat, peddler, who Anglicized his name to Morris Kiviat. That tidbit comes by way of an email from linguist Marc Picard of the American Name Society listserv. Marc added:

The epenthetic vowel is not surprising given that /kv/ is an impermissible initial consonant cluster in English.

As for David Kwiat, he joined his father’s business at the age of 17, in 1933—not an auspicious year for luxury goods. Nevertheless, according to his obituary, “despite the difficult economic conditions of the Great Depression era, the business grew throughout the decade.” David Kwiat remained active in the business until the end of his life; his grandchildren now run the company.

Read my December 2008 post about selling diamonds in an economic downturn, “Stones.”

And Speaking of Diamonds...

...as we were only yesterday, Daddy Likey reminded me of the dazzling creations of Irina Blok, which I mentioned last year. This pendant says everything a two-carat rock would, but with waaay more wit:

  

Shrinky Dinks are a girl's best friend!

Still just $25 (plus $5.95 shipping)! Order here.

Stones

So you think your employment outlook is iffy? Spare a tear, if you will, for the folks who fabricate desire and demand for diamonds in these parlous times. It's a tough job, yet they persist. Like a rock, you might say.

From a trade publication, National Jeweler:

Stressing the appeal of owning "fewer, better things," De Beers' newly intensified holiday marketing campaign will promote the diamond jewelry gift as a rock-solid "icon of enduring value" in rickety economic times.

With a marketing budget that is double last year's (precise figures are not disclosed), the campaign will encompass television, print and online advertising, Diamond Promotion Service (DPS) executives said during a breakfast presentation for the trade and the press at the Waldorf-Astoria in New York City ...

The ad blitz is expected to reach 97 million U.S. consumers, or nearly half the adult population, at least six times over the holiday season.

One of the print ads currently in circulation reads:

Perhaps now is an opportunity to reassess what really matters. After all, if everything you ever bought her disappeared overnight, what would she truly miss?

The dramatically lit photo depicts, of course, a stonking pair of diamond earrings.

There are multiple ways of reading this campaign. Passage des Perles is peeved by the tacit sexism of the message:

You've gotta hand it to the present day Don Draper who cast this lifeline toward a gutted industry. Don did his research well. I do want fewer things of higher quality, and carats trump costume. But I rankled at the patronizing "everything you ever bought her". Isn't this the same industry who in boom times encouraged women to buy their own stones? What happened? Suddenly we're all retro and it's over to the guy, who hardly needs the pressure now.

Sexism—or chutzpah? Here's another way of cracking the nut. Faced with the same challenge—getting a guy to buy more bling when he may be having trouble making the car payments—JCPenney takes a humorous tack, with overtones of public shaming. The subtext: No little box with sparkly stuff inside? Dude, you are SO BUSTED.

Here's the problem with diamonds: They can't feed you or keep you warm; they can't transport you to work; they're easy to lose and notoriously poor investments, as this still-relevant 1982 Atlantic article, "Have You Ever Tried to Sell a Diamond?", attests. And that's what makes diamond marketing so fascinating. Paradoxically, diamond sellers have relied more and more on the trumped-up scarcity pitch as the world supply of diamonds has increased. Indeed, if there weren't such a glut of diamonds the De Beers cartel wouldn't be so frantic to unload them. (The market is even more competitive now that cheap laboratory diamonds, which mostly didn't exist in 1982, are virtually indistinguishable from the slave-labor-mined variety.) But instead of slashing prices, like other desperate, overstocked retailers, De Beers is doing what it's done for nearly a century: brazenly burnishing the myth that diamonds are not a frivolous luxury but rather the hard currency of the romantic enterprise. Even in bleak economic times. Especially in bleak economic times.

A little historical background from the Atlantic article:

In their subsequent investigation of the American diamond market, the staff of [ad agency] N. W. Ayer found that since the end of World War I, in 1919, the total amount of diamonds sold in America, measured in carats, had declined by 50 percent; at the same time, the quality of the diamonds, measured in dollar value, had declined by nearly 100 percent. An Ayer memo concluded that the depressed state of the market for diamonds was "the result of the economy, changes in social attitudes and the promotion of competitive luxuries."

Although it could do little about the state of the economy, N. W. Ayer suggested that through a well-orchestrated advertising and public-relations campaign it could have a significant impact on the "social attitudes of the public at large and thereby channel American spending toward larger and more expensive diamonds instead of "competitive luxuries." Specifically, the Ayer study stressed the need to strengthen the association in the public's mind of diamonds with romance. Since "young men buy over 90% of all engagement rings" it would be crucial to inculcate in them the idea that diamonds were a gift of love: the larger and finer the diamond, the greater the expression of love. Similarly, young women had to be encouraged to view diamonds as an integral part of any romantic courtship.

And today? Janus Thinking, a research and consulting firm that specializes in the diamond industry, has this to say (again, hat tip to Passage des Perles):

The diamond industry is de facto, bankrupt.  But the answer to its future is not to be found in economics, but in psychology. Psychological forces are more important than economic ones.  While economic forces keep on changing over time, psychological forces are stable; what we see today could be identified yesterday and will still true be tomorrow.

More importantly, as the recent economic events taught us, there are economic factors that we do not have control of or cannot change. Psychological factors are within our reach and once we understand them we can certainly try to cope with them.

My advice? Skip the diamonds. (Skip the vacuum cleaner, too.) Give books! I'll have some gift recommendations in a few days.

Photo: Two-carat "Forever Studs" ($20,300) by De Beers.