Sunday Strategist: Diamond Merchants’ Headaches Are Forever

You know you have a marketing problem when you find yourself arguing that the competitor's product is "simply too perfect looking." Or when you fall back on warning people that if they buy the competitor's product they may not be able to resell it—when reselling it was never their intention anyway.

That's the diamond business for you. It gets harder every year for diamond merchants to fetch a good price for their product because the competition is insane. First there's mounting production of natural diamonds. And now synthetic diamonds have gotten so good that for average customers they're indistinguishable from the kind that come out of the ground. On top of all that, some customers are turned off by the violence endemic in parts of diamond mining, featured in Leonardo DiCaprio's film Blood Diamond.