The Business of Desire A DIAMOND IS FOREVER. But that’s no excuse not to buy one at least every four years, according to J. Walter Thompson, representing South African diamond mining cartel De Beers.
To encourage more frequent diamond purchases, the agency and De Beers are getting into relationship marketing, and positioning their Web site (www .adiamondisforever.com) to be the center of the relationship.
“The Internet is the one medium where we can keep in touch with a woman over a period of years,” says Anne Ritchie, partner and account director at J. Walter Thompson. Her company has extensively researched the diamond purchase process, and has found in the case of married couples it most commonly begins with a woman seeing a ring she likes, then campaigning for the item to her husband for an average of four years. “If we can get her to want that piece more, she’ll get it quicker,” Ritchie says, adding that because of the length of time between a woman identifying an item and receiving it, her group works to keep diamonds “top of mind.”
To this end, the agency has built its Web site to encourage repeat visits, such as inviting users to register to be notified of new features. About 100,000 people have registered from two main target demographics: men and women aged 18-34 in serious relationships and shopping for a diamond engagement ring, and married men and women aged 25-54 with a household income of more than $75,000 and two or more diamonds in the woman’s jewelry box.
DO-IT-YOURSELF Currently the Web site’s visitors skew toward the younger group, in part because of the central interactive feature of the site, Design Your Own Engagement Ring. Shoppers for a diamond solitaire, whether unmarried or married, can use the interactive tool to build a ring step-by-step, choosing the stone, the sidestones and the band. The user can then print out his or her desired design and bring it their local diamond retailer.
The site also enables do-it-yourself jewelry designers to e-mail pictures of their creations and other pre-designed rings to friends and family. This feature has resulted in the site finding new users through viral marketing. Ritchie says roughly 20% of users e-mail pictures to friends and family, and that as a result the number of visitors to the site grew more than 60% before the agency even advertised the site.
Through a combination of viral marketing and mass media advertising, the number of people visiting adiamondisforever.com on a monthly basis has jumped more than 375% from 36,000 in May 1999, to 173,000 in June 2000.
The site encourages repeat visits in other ways, including enabling users to create an online jewelry box in which to save pictures of their favorite rings along with personal notes about each ring, and to print and e-mail pictures of them. For the last six months of 1999, each site visitor was coming back an average of four times a month. In the second quarter of 2000, each visitor was coming back an average of seven times a month.
Ritchie says these steps mark the beginnings of De Beers’ Web-based CRM initiative, which will evolve when the site relaunches with improved design and functionality this month. De Beers and J. Walter Thompson are also developing a more formal online CRM program, scheduled to debut in 2001, involving getting a woman to pick out the piece of jewelry she really likes, then helping her communicate her wishes to the man at the right time.
“The goal,” says Ritchie, “is to get her to desire it and him to buy it.”
Network
