#RJIF2024: Diamond retailers need to be future-ready for time-poor youth

At the opening 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 imagery of natural diamond jewellery with pop culture, AI, celeb engagement and more

NDC has championed consumer communication and established a link from trade to end-consumers via multiple innovative campaigns in 2023, said Singh, stating that NDC started 2024 with a mammoth 100 million views on its website, in her presentation ‘Are we future-ready? Decoding the real potential of natural diamonds.’ Bringing diamonds back in vogue, NDC has three high-profile brand integrations – Koffee with Karan S7, The Wedding Planner Season 2, and Bollywood Wives. “We talk only to the top 10 cities and luxury consumers, although we try to cover all major markets in India,” said Singh. A more significant consumer share in the market means strengthening the entire value chain based on consumer demand.

She said jewellers in India grossly underestimate the overall demand for luxury products and steered the discourse towards a penchant for new-age luxury in jewellery with the following insights:

• Young end-consumers are particularly fond of reading about sustainability initiatives by jewellery brands, so much so that about 6,00,000 viewers read each long-form update on sustainability by NDC

• NDC’s Collaborations with OTT platforms such as Disney+Hotstar and Amazon Prime Video have meant that A-list celebs such as Ranvir Singh, Alia Bhatt, Karan Johar, Sobhita Dhulipala and Saba Azad talk about natural diamonds, making is highly aspirational.

• As the audience gets swamped with content, distractions become the norm, and the attention time for each jewellery brand becomes a few seconds to a minute to appeal to any young customer. Hence, content has to be top-notch.

• The biggest competitor for Indian jewellers is the F&B and allied luxury industries such as alcohol, automobile, and real estate NDC is touching base with influencers such as supermodel fashion influencer Rahi Chadda and 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.

She added that jewellers should encourage story-telling so that the audience becomes fond of the whole journey of jewellery-making. This would get jewellery out from lockers to drawers and make it an integral part of one’s personality. Diamond jewellers of today have to facilitate customers so that they get to try all their fashion choices to suit all moods, she declared.