Following the economic upheaval of the Depression and World War Two, DeBeers, the company with nearly an absolute stranglehold on the diamond supply, began a marketing campaign of such ferocity that it literally changed the structure of Western value systems, but most notably in America. Commencing in the 1930s, this campaign spent in the U.S. alone on average per year over 100 million dollars on advertising. The current budget to promote diamonds by DeBeers is around 200 million USD a year. The association of diamonds first with royalty now turned to love as its key lure. The pervasiveness of the slogan, "A diamond is forever," first written in 1948, demonstrates the effectiveness this campaign has had in forging the symbolic value of diamonds in the American consciousness.…
