#RJIF 2024: Richa Singh of NDC urges diamond retailers to be future-ready for low-attention span consumers

At the inaugural session of the Retail Jeweller India Forum 2024, Richa Singh, MD, Natural Diamond Council (India, Middle East) spoke of various strategies adopted to modernize the concept of diamond jewellery with pop culture, AI, celeb engagement and more 

Mumbai: A greater consumer share in the market means strengthening the entire value chain based on consumer demand. The Natural Diamond Council (NDC), a champion of consumer communication, established a link from trade to end-consumers via multiple innovative campaigns in 2023. Richa Singh, MD, Natural Diamond Council (India, Middle East) summed it up during her session at the Retail Jeweller India Forum 2024, held at JW Marriott, Sahar in Mumbai on January 3.

Recapping milestones 

NDC started 2024 with a mammoth 100 million views on its website, said Richa Singh, adding that it aims to tap into the not-so-dormant curiosity of customers in buying luxury diamond jewellery. “Do you know how many pieces Cartier sold in the first week after Jio World Plaza opened?” Singh asked, stressing the fact that jewellers in India grossly underestimate the demand and consumers’ buying power for luxury products. 

With 102 million social media engagements, and 90 million YouTube views, NDC has done 845 collaborations with retailers, designers and partners only in India. While talking of the youth’s fixation on gadgetry and other luxury verticals, Singh mentioned that people are particularly fond of reading about sustainability initiatives, so much so that about 6,00,000 viewers actually read each long-form update by NDC on the website. 

“We talk only to the top 10 cities and luxury consumers, although we try to cover all major markets in India. Bringing diamonds back to vogue, NDC has three high-profile brand integrations to talk about – Koffee with Karan S7, The Wedding Planner Season 2, and Bollywood Housewives,” said Singh. 

Singh displayed video excerpts from each of those associations, wherein Karan Johar and Ranveer Singh were seen discussing how Sindhis love their diamond jewellery, actor Sobhita Dhulipala introduced NDC to the audience, and actor-musician Saba Azad was seen in a candid video shoot. “Launched in the last week of December 2023, the Saba Azad campaign got 18 lakh views by Jan 2. On the other hand, the scene in a particular episode on Bollywood Housewives speaking about their love for diamonds became 42 minutes long, but had to be trimmed to three minutes,” she added.  

Manifesting diamond moments

“For a man, the first ambitious manifestation is a car. For a 24-year-old woman, it’s a solitaire,” said Singh as she talked about slow fashion and ethics gaining traction at the NDC x Vogue Diamond Festival held last year. NDC is also touching base with influencers such as supermodel-fashion influencer Rahi Chadda and making an attempt to modernize the outlook of the Indian gems and jewellery industry, by re-imagining protagonists of popular fairytales with AI-generated imagery and diamond jewellery inspired by stylists. “Little Mermaid Ariel, Snow White, Belle of Beauty and the Beast, Alice and Aurora of Sleeping Beauty were visualized anew, with their characters re-imagined to suit the youth,” explained Singh. “We went to China in September, after our show in August. The general feedback was not positive from that country, but India’s industry is positive enough to execute a better 2024.” 

Mantras for new consumers

Singh spoke of the ‘myth-busting report’, a third-party-assessed initiative in which it explains pre-conceived notions about the natural diamond industry. NDC also engaged in three big collaborations with jewellery partners in the UAE, Singh said and outlined the major mantras of NDC after a minute assessment of the young consumer’s psyche. 

As luxury gets experiential, Singh pointed out that the biggest competitor for Indian jewellers is the F&B and allied luxury industries such as alcohol, automobile and real estate in India today. Talking of tech integrations, Singh cited examples of immersive OOH advertising by the OTT platform Peacock and a successful campaign by Sunfeast in which AI can help embed mugshots of any consumer of Sunfeast and paste them beside Shah Rukh Khan in its ad. Such examples prove to be key learnings for jewellers, Singh observed.

As the audience gets swamped with content, distractions become the norm and the attention time for each jewellery brand to appeal to any young customer is not more than a few seconds to a minute, Singh pointed out. She added that jewellers should encourage story-telling in a way that the audience becomes fond of the whole journey of jewellery-making, in order to get jewellery out from lockers to drawers and make it an integral part of one’s personality. 

Singh dwelt on the timeless history of customizing jewellery, a trend that other industries are lapping up too fast. Diamond jewellers of today have to facilitate customers in a way that they get to try all their fashion choices to suit all moods, she declared. The onus is on retailers to bring back the grandeur of Indian emperors’ love for jewellery and replicate it for men of today, while not forgetting the basic hygiene of transparency, which is an important point of consideration when a customer is debating between two brands, Singh concluded. 

Written by Ashwin Bose

Retail Jeweller India Exclusive