COMMENTARY OF THE MONTH

March 23, 2005

Wedded to The West
Robyn Meredith, 03.14.05

A decade of advertising has changed Chinese traditions, maybe forever.

A Chinese fable has it that when babies are born, a Chinese version of Cupid ties a red string around the ankle of a baby boy and baby girl destined to meet and marry later in life. The lucky-colored leash is today taking on a sparkle.

In just a decade De Beers Group has caused diamond sales in China to quintuple to 2.3 million stones last year. Along the way it has changed wedding traditions in a nation of 1.3 billion, using everything from advertising to staging parades to planting plots in television shows to convince the Chinese that zuan shi heng jiu yuan, yi ke yong liu chuan, or--you guessed it--"a diamond is forever."

There was no such thing as a diamond wedding ring or engagement band in China until De Beers started marketing diamonds there in 1993. In traditional Chinese weddings the dress is red, not white, and the gift from the groom's family is jade or gold jewelry.

Now many young brides wear white and often as not sport a crystalline rock. Diamond sales in China reached $1.2 billion in 2003. And that was after television and magazine advertisements from JWT (né J. Walter Thompson) appeared in just 11 eastern Chinese cities. Last year the Diamond Trading Co., De Beers' rough-diamond sales and marketing arm, expanded its advertising campaigns to 9 more cities, and this year it plans television, magazine and newspaper ads touting diamond wedding rings in 17 additional Chinese cities.

"This has happened much more quickly than we ever thought it would," says Christina Hudson, marketing director for greater China at the unit of the world's biggest diamond miner. DTC spent $5 million advertising the gems in China last year.

How did De Beers do it? Think of it as the perfect storm for Chinese boyfriends everywhere. Fifty years of communism, and especially a decade of Mao's Cultural Revolution, interrupted many Chinese traditions. Now advertisers like De Beers are offering the Chinese an ingrained Western tradition to supplant a largely unfamiliar one of their own. " Young generations are as familiar with diamonds as they are with jade," says Huang Hung, chief executive of China Interactive Media Group, publisher of Chinese-language Seventeen.