What makes a diamond valuable? The 4 Cs? Really?

[Johnbt]

"the most successful one being simply showing consumers various options at or within their budget, asking them which diamond they would prefer on the finger "

I'm sure it works on some people. Maybe on most for all I know, much like car dealers are successful selling monthly payments to people blinded by the shiny colors, showroom lights and that new car smell.

But to make every possible sale they need to tailor their approach to each individual customer.

My fiancee went into a Diamonds Direct to look at settings and to try and decide if she wanted a 1.5 carat round or a 2.0 carat round or maybe something in between. The salesman wanted to show her set diamonds without revealing what size the stones were (or the color or the quality or the price.) When she had decided on her favorite he would then, he said, tell her something about it. It never got that far...

I'd been giving her a primer on the basics of cut using examples from WF and she insisted that what she needed to know wasn't what he was pushing. Then he got flustered and put his foot in his mouth without ever attempting to answer any of her questions... "And where is your fiance today?" She said she looked at him and said, "Why?" (Insert the sound of crickets.)

He shouldn't have implied that a 63-year-old woman with children and grandchildren, 2 college degrees, post-grad work and a counseling license needs a man's help to make up her mind. He should have answered her questions before asking his.

The day before we'd been in a 3-state chain store - Fink's - at the local expensive mall and the saleswoman told us that their gemologist graded their diamonds and if a diamond was in the lower third of a color they would grade it a letter lower. And no, lab reports were not available even by request. She showed us a 1 carat and a 2 carat - big whoop. Nice lights in the ceiling. No help at all on the diamond details. Not available.

Anyway, retail is a funny thing. There are all sorts of methods used to separate folks from their money.

A formerly high end Richmond store is now part of a mega-chain. The salesman told me I didn't need to buy anything higher than an I or a J. I told him I wanted an F or maybe an E and asked what he could get and what my choices were. (Insert more crickets chirping.) Dang it, I HATE having to work to spend my money. I got no help at all. I suppose a rich retired guy in shorts and tackle shop t-shirt from the beach - new, right out of the package - didn't impress him. He didn't even offer to show me Hearts on Fire rings when I looked into the case. (I've worked retail, don't assume, keep the conversatoin flowing.)

I ordered two wedding rings from WF today. They even give a small discount to return customers. I like spending money locally, but they have to add some value to the deal to make a sale.

Oh well, enough whining.

 

[Serg]

Hi Sergey,

Interesting points, but you are generalizing a bit too much.

Agreed, the main attraction of diamonds as such is brilliance and fire. That is my observation in the OP. You blame the trade for taking the commoditizing strategy of the 4 C's. I blame the fact that diamond-marketing for almost a century was dominated by miners, who incidentally are not selling brilliance or fire, only the potential for cutters to create, release, enhance brilliance and/or fire. Who is right in whom to blame is immaterial. We do agree that the 4 C's are not in line with consumers' desires.

As for the trade using all these negative approaches, I kind of follow your reasoning. We ourselves teach different approaches, the most successful one being simply showing consumers various options at or within their budget, asking them which diamond they would prefer on the finger (or elsewhere). 4 C's are only revealed afterwards. Without the distraction of C's, the choice is dramatically different.

Obviously, our approach lends itself better for in-store-presentations. Still, also online-consumers going through an actual comparison come to surprizing conclusions.

Live long,

Biggest my generalising was including 4C in negative marketing list. May be I need exclude it.
in such case my statement is :

"While there is no chance to demonstrate a positive difference in brilliancy and fire, the trade uses another strategy, a negative one: the distance of a stone from a declared reference. This strategy is used by many marketing initiatives, including: IS, ASET, AGS0, 3X, Ideal diamonds, Super Ideal diamonds, real super ideal diamonds, real is rare, etc."

 

[TreeScientist]

Great point TreeScientist.

I really did not want this topic to be CBI-centric, but your suggestion deserves a reaction

And we absolutely considered this. In development we surveyed consumers about different public-facing searches as you suggest. But departing from the “Blue Nile” model every seller seems to use resulted in confusion, lack of interest and (the killing dagger) navigation away from the page without researching more.

We are still crusading though. With HPD, you see, there is only ONE cut option offered. Period. All else is sifted out. The heavy lifting is done. That in itself is swimming upstream. In the spirit of Garry’s “0.0000000001” comment - which is not far off - it is precisely what we are doing. And the show and tell we present in our stores and on HPD website has great impact, especially when seen in person. Giving a consumer the choice between varying sizes, colors and clarities, all at the same budget, it converts many to our position.

But it comes with tremendous challenges when 99 of 100 competing retailers scream GIA EX is enough, going down in color is less desirable and here is a discount, don’t pay some “premium” for cut... Which is incredibly ironic when we are actually making far less than other players due to our commitment to the 0.0000000001% niche. Yet this is our crusade - so our yield is going to be less, superior transparent starting material comes at a premium, labor skill, tools and time cost more and the challenge to educate is far greater swimming against the old notions. But the visual results are undeniable. That itself is also ironic: Most people, including many professional jewelers, have never even seen diamonds cut like ours or others near the sobering micro percentage Garry provided. And yet every worker from Zales to Costco holds forth as an expert on the topic.

As a middle solution along the lines of your suggestion you may notice that HPD lists budget first, and the sift which appears when budget is entered comes with largest weight first, regardless of color-clarity. As we believe size and sparkle are the drivers for many. That is something they use as a bridge for dialogue. Adding diameter would be a good step. Candidly, we didn’t simply because our depth/spread tolerances are rather minuscule. So the correlation is fairly constant. But your point is a good one in the spirit of the dialogue.

I hope we can continue the discussion without it becoming CBI-centric. Hence, my suggestion to adapt the PS-search. Wouldn’t such change have enormous impact on the first selection of the unprepared consumer, stumbling upon PS?

Live long,

Great reply. Sorry for the late response Paul. I was busy in the lab this week and away from PS.

I do see your point in how straying from the "Blue Nile"-type search function would confuse a lot of consumers. But I'm not suggesting to take away these search options completely, I'm suggesting to add a "mm size" slide bar to the search options. Granted, most people would probably still search by carat weight, but if you want to begin changing people's perception about the relative importance of a set of benchmarks (in this case actual apparent size vs weight), then you need to start emphasizing the information that you want consumers to view as important. Honestly, I don't blame most consumers for directly associating carat weight with actual appearance, because carat weight is what literally every retailer provides to consumers as the benchmark for size. mm dimension is the forgotten/neglected stepchild, often cast aside to some supplementary info tab on a diamond's info page. So it's no wonder that, when you show consumers one .9 carat and one steep/deep 1 carat that are both 6.2mm, tell them that one is .9 carat and one is 1 carat, and then ask them which one is bigger, they will almost always point to the 1 carat diamond. Psychology influences much of perception.

I totally agree with you that, when it comes to CBIs (and well-cut diamonds in general), there is a strong correlation between carat weight and face-up diameter, but the point of adding mm-diameter to the search function is to change people's perception of what is important when it comes to diamond size. To shift their focus away from the "carat" C and to get them focusing on what really matters, which is face-up spread.

Remember, when people are searching for diamonds, they are likely not only looking at HP Diamond's website. They're probably looking at diamonds from a bunch of other online vendors as well. The average consumer, who may not spend much time on PS, may just want to maximize the size for their budget. If they go on HPDs website and they see a .9 carat F/SI1 diamond for $6700, and then they go on another website or to a maul store and are quoted $6500 for a 1 carat F/SI1 with an "excellent" cut grade from some no-name lab, then they may go for the maul store diamond because they think it will look larger and it has an "excellent" cut grade, which should be enough. They may not bother to check the supplementary tab of HPDs website showing you that the .9 carat is 6.22mm, and without any awareness of the importance of mm size, they may not bother to look and see that the maul store 1 carat is actually smaller at 6.2mm.

However, if the same consumer sees the face-up spread of the .9 carat CBI prominently displayed next to carat weight on the HPD search page, it may prime their brain to check for the spread when they go to the maul store to compare diamonds. And having this extra comparison, where the CBI win's out in size, may just sway their decision away from the badly cut stone and towards the well cut one.

And yes, I agree that adding mm spread to the PS diamond search function would be nice, but that is Garry's decision to make. And I think he's already busy enough now with adding size to the HCA, which I think may actually be more helpful to PS members than adding to the diamond search function.

As a trade-member who dislikes the prominence of the 4Cs in swaying diamond selection, I think this one change to your vendor's websites could make an impact on how consumers view at least one of the Cs when it comes to selecting CBIs.

 

[Paul-Antwerp]

Thank you for the reply, TreeScientist.

I think that you are slightly off, in the sense that I am talking about 'apparent diameter' or 'apparent surface', while you are talking about diameter-measurements. I also think that Garry is considering to incorporate 'apparent diameter' into the HCA.

Talking 'apparent diameter', we do not have the research to support it. Even if we could, how could we defend posting it unilaterally? It seems that Garry has the research and that is fantastic. I would definitely look into licensing it, if we can incorporate it into our listing. Still, on a broader note, incorporating it into the PS-search would benefit far more consumers and professional retailers.

To give you real life example, something I often do when visiting one of our retail-stores. On the one hand, I take one of our 1.25's. Then, I ask them if they have something in-store, 1.50+, similar color and clarity. Generally, that is GIA-graded, most often 3EX.

Next, I put both stones in a viewing-box and ask observers (staff, sales-staff, consumers, …) to tell me which stone looks biggest. Most often, size is considered similar and in low-lighting, often the 1.25 is considered bigger.

Garry, having the technology to (partially) show this in figures, has a very important weapon in hand. I love it. Reducing its use to a sub-aspect of HCA, thus limiting it to a sub-part of Cut-quality, is sad, I think. Accepting on the other hand that this technology devastates at least the C of Carat Weight could be ground-breaking.

Live long,

 

[Texas Leaguer]

Garry, having the technology to (partially) show this in figures, has a very important weapon in hand. I love it. Reducing its use to a sub-aspect of HCA, thus limiting it to a sub-part of Cut-quality, is sad, I think. Accepting on the other hand that this technology devastates at least the C of Carat Weight could be ground-breaking.

Live long,

I agree with Paul - if it is possible to design an accurate "apparent size" metric, it should be a prominent feature, not just built in under the hood of the tool.

I also agree it could be ground-breaking. Though it seems like just an add-on feature to the HCA tool, the implications would be far reaching. It could mark a long overdue turning point from the unhelpful and counter-productive focus on weight.

 

[josieKat]

You might consider pulling some psychological scientists, especially ones who work on perception, in to collaborate on the work. Psychologists are really good at designing measures that rely on human perception, and assessing the validity and reliability of those measures. Yes, an individual's perception of apparent size/diameter or even brightness etc will be subjective, but if you do the studies on a large enough sample size you would have the scientific evidence that those perceptions align one way or another.