How to Sell Diamonds
and Other Illogical Things
Information can be relevant objectively but have no relevance to you personally. This is the difference between objective reality and perceptual reality.
The opposite is true, as well.
You can perceive a person to be beautiful, or a piece of information to be important, when that person is objectively average and the information is actually of no value at all. But in perceptual reality, that person is beautiful. In perceptual reality, the information is vitally important.
Objective facts are never enough to win the heart and mind. The magic that creates perceptual reality is Relevance.
Relevance is a happy shout of Yes to the question, “Do I care?”
The first time I taught publicly about perceptual reality was in 1994 when I was invited to speak to 1,500 jewelers in London at the 400th Anniversary Celebration of the Goldsmiths of the United Kingdom. Afterwards, Pennie and I were whisked away to the world headquarters of DeBeers to meet with Roger Van Egan, their director of marketing.
DeBeers wanted to know why my small handful of jewelry clients in the US were selling 20 times more diamonds than the average jeweler.
The answer, in a word, was Relevance.
Late at night on date nights, my jewelers were speaking to young men listening to the radio.
“The Christmas season is a GREAT time to get engaged. When you show up at the Christmas party of your girlfriend’s parents and she is NOT wearing an engagement ring, you get to listen to Great Aunt Gertrude talk all night long about her recent gallstone surgery. But if your girlfriend IS wearing an engagement ring, the only thing Aunt Gertrude will want to know is whether you’d like another piece of pie before, or after you ride Cousin Larry’s new motorcyle. That girl you love is going to show her new engagement ring to everyone she cares about, and most of those people are going to be conveniently gathered together at Christmastime. One more thing: the day she starts wearing your engagement ring is the day her Mom quits calling you “What’s-his-name.”
“But your ad didn’t say anything about why he should buy an engagement from your client! You said only that he should buy an engagement ring!”
Au contraire, mon frère. That ad made my jeweler fun, approachable, and most importantly, NOT SCARY.
When courtship mode has run its course and the honeymoon is over, men who believe “actions speak louder than words,” tend to be poor communicators.
Seeds of doubt, disillusionment and divorce are planted when a woman begins to think, “This is not the man I married. He doesn’t love me anymore.”
“Ladies, many of you will…
My ad on the radio is saying to men, “Buy a diamond from my client and she’ll attribute everything I just said in this ad to YOU. Now won’t THAT be grand!”
About 2 and 1/2 million couples get married in the US each year. But there are
Big Anniversary Diamonds, twice as much…
Do you remember what I said about relevance? If mister “Actions speak louder than words,” truly doesn’t love her anymore, he won’t buy the diamond. But if he does love her and can’t find the words to tell her, I’m confident he can still find his way to the jewelry store.
She wins, He wins, the jeweler wins, and I win.
It’s easy to support perceptual reality with objective facts.
Facts are a lot more adaptable than you think.
Roy H. Williams
“Win the heart and the mind will follow. The… (get quote from Ad Dog and from WoA 1998)
Add copyright circles to all ad copy and to the “Win the heart…” quote