On 1916, in Philadelphia, one of the greatest personalities in advertising was born. A copywriter who earned a place in the pantheon for four words, one of the most influential and brilliant pieces of human behavioral psychology in history.
Her name was Frances Gerety.
“Francis Gerety dreamed of writing the great American novel and in a way he succeeded, because created the modern tradition of commitment ,” he told BBC J Courtney Sullivan, author of the acclaimed novel The Engagements or “Time for Promises”, in which she explores changing attitudes towards love, dating and marriage in the United States of the twentieth century.
“At the end of the decade of 1930, the De Beers corporation turned to NW Ayer, the most prominent advertising agency in the US at the time, because they had a problem: women in America had not been interested in wearing diamond rings for a while. ”Sullivan points out.
“ Most said they would rather have something like a washing machine, which was practical.
“ There is really no intrinsic value to a diamond, and they had than to convince women (although, in fact, men even more) that the diamond was what legitimized the commitment itself. ”
A piece of coal
Very little human economic activity, especially these days, is based on something we could call ‘utility’ : once you have your 2. 000 calories a day, a little water and a warm place and dry where to shelter, your survival is practically solved.
So what do you spend your money and extra effort on?
Just like all the main companies on the planet, you have your own budget of marketing.
“As soon as the animals were able to selectively choose their mates based on visual ornamentation, the animals became living advertisements for the clothes they wore,” explains New Mexico evolutionary psychologist Jeffrey Miller.
The expert has spent much of his career exploring the parallels between the way our primitive ancestors chose their mates and the way modern humans select consumer products.
” On an intuitive level, they took a worthless piece of compressed carbon and signal theory , and created a social norm that is difficult to resist as it says: ‘You must buy this or what Otherwise you don’t really value who you love. ‘”
In a few words
So how does this fit in with Frances Gerety, the aspiring novelist from Philadelphia?
“ When she came to NW Ayer, they told her it was the perfect time because the agency had just lost a copywriter that day and at the time it was thought that only women could write for certain female campaigns, ”says Courtney Sullivan.
“She was a bit of a procrastinator, so she went to sleep and forgot she was supposed to write an ad tagline. So he woke up at 3: 00 am and scribbled something on a piece of paper “.
A note written in the middle of the night with the best four words in the history of advertising… although his colleagues did not think that was the case when he presented them.
“It was in a meeting full of men. They said it wasn’t grammatically correct, it really didn’t make sense… it was almost totally knocked down, ”Courtney Sullivan notes.
It was 1947 and the phrase that men in suits almost rejected was this: A diamond is forever or “A diamond is forever“.
Best Friends
Needing an attractive hook, the agency reluctantly accepted Frances’s grammatically incorrect tagline and associated her with pioneering marketing guru Dorothy Dignam.
The pair set out to sneak the diamonds into the public consciousness.
“Dorothy had a celebrity gossip column that has He blamed who had proposed to whom. But if you look closely, he always mentioned a diamond “, says Courtney Sullivan.
” The curious thing about The theory of signaling is that everyone understands it on a very intuitive level. And that’s why conspicuous consumption works so well, “says Miller.
” The campaign for De Beers was key in the placement of diamonds in Hollywood movies.
“In the case of Gentlemen Prefer Blondes (” Gentlemen prefer blondes “, film by 1953), which includes the song Diamonds are a girl’s best friend , although they had nothing to do with her, when the film came out, Dorothy Dignam brought in reporters from across the country and convinced the people behind the movie to put real diamonds on Marilyn Monroe instead of costume jewelry “, says Courtney Sullivan.
“After just two years after the campaign was launched, the sale of diamonds in the United States increased by 55% ”.
So if you thought that sealing the promise of eternal love with a diamond ring is a tradition, then you weren’t completely wrong.
Only that it is a tradition that began to take shape in the middle of the last century and with a jewelery advertisement .
For the others
Frustratingly, for historians of the art of advertising, Frances revealed very little about her private world and we have no idea what research or data she used to hit the mark.
“When I was writing the book, I heard that there were these company memos, big leather-bound books that They contained all the psychological evaluation that they were always doing on clients to try to find the best way to attract them emotionally. I looked for them for two years but couldn’t find them ”, says Courtney Sullivan.
And there is a fascinating irony: the woman whose words float powerfully at so many weddings around the world never experienced for herself what she was able to imagine so seductively for others.
“Frances did not embody, according to her co-workers, the traditionally feminine spirit. She liked that her mother called her Frank instead of Frances, and in the photographs of her son she appeared dressed as a boy.
“She lived in a lovely house in a suburb, she had dogs, but at the seem n never had an interest in marriage “.
The best
Frances Geraghty’s iconic “A diamond is forever” line not only subtly and attractively draws attention to the fact that a ring is beautiful and a symbol of status, it is also a sign of long-term good intentions on the part of the buyer.
And that brings us to an interesting area: is buying the ring a gift only for the recipient or is it also a status symbol for the buyer?
“I think there is absolutely a perception that women are the ones who drive the desire for diamond rings, but in fact, many of the ads over the decades were aimed directly at men “, says Courtney Sullivan.
Before and after the adoption of the slogan” a diamond is forever “, De Beers had used another famous phrase in advertising:” the salary of a month ”(the cost of an engagement ring).
In the decade of 1980 turned in “the two-month salary”, in advertisements that said, for example: “How do you make the two-month salary last forever?”
“It was a very clever and successful approach.”
But from 1947 that approach and all others were accompanied by those four words of Frances Gerety, so brilliantly vague that they fit the prevailing culture of each era.
“In the decade of 1970, the ad showed a barefoot couple in the field and would say: ‘my church maybe a meadow and my wedding will not be like my mother’s, but a diamond is for always’.
“In the years 80, the couple was dressed in black leather and sitting on a motorcycle And he was like, ‘I know you love rock and roll, so I got a great rock. A diamond is forever, ‘”says Courtney Sullivan.
Francis Geraghty retired from NW Ayer in the decade of 1970 after having written all of De Beer’s commercials for a quarter of a century.
Two weeks before he died in 1999 at the age of 83 years, the influential industry magazine Ad Age declared their slogan the “Best catchphrase of the 20th century.”
Rory Sutherland is one of the most prominent m advertising professionals of the world and this art icle is an adaptation of the fourth episode of his BBC series “Marketing: Hacking the Unconscious” .
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