A great piece of marketing work will always feel fresh, timely, right for the moment, audience and brand, and achingly perfectly crafted to create a lasting memory. Some work feels great and trendy in its time, but only some stay long term afterward.
At the beginning of my career, I worked with creative strategist Noam Manella, "The Creative Code," who opened my vision and passion for always being keen on searching for insights, finding hidden segments in statistic reports, microtrends, and look for "purple cow" concepts… For 20+ years, I was very fortunate to work in different cultures and find inspiration in cross-cultural trends. For the last 3.5 years, I've been leading the Sarine technology brand. I joined the company at the end of 2018 when Sarine decided to disrupt the diamond retail space, entering a field with established competitors. I was surprised to learn that high-tech solutions and AI are behind the scenes of such a shiny industry. The strategic goal was to start repositioning the company as "retail-oriented" rather than "manufacturing-oriented".
Sarine was a newcomer in this arena, it was definitely a challenge.
Marketing Creation at Sarine
The first project was to establish a strong statement in diamond provenance. Today, in 2022, every significant player in the industry recognizes the importance of being able to provide provenance data. Back in 2019, sustainability and origin were at the seed of the idea. I still remember the moment of silence in the meeting room with Sarine's senior management during the first concept presentation of our new storytelling that celebrated the "imperfections (inclusions) in rough diamonds" and linked them to the "flaws" in people. It was uncertain about substituting the safe, creative option of merely showing "AI and machines" with the fresh, new approach that celebrates diversity and authenticity.
Yes, It was clearly a risky strategy! The conservative diamond industry dictated concepts of romance, moments, and glam. But we believed that only a shocking departure from category norms would allow us to create the awareness and engagement needed to disrupt the established diamond retail sector and make an impact.
The campaign in 6 languages with the core idea: "Just like a person, every diamond has a unique story waiting to be told," generated over 1.2M B2B views on YouTube alone and has received rave reviews from industry insiders. To this day, retailers are using the campaign's video in their showrooms and exhibitions, which for us, is 'beyond our expectations of the concept's relevance.
What Does the Future Hold for the Brand?
A question every CMO asks daily, weekly, whole career. It's an infinite structured process of checking the market's pulse, the industry trends, the consumer TOM (Top of Mind), and trying to understand "where the wind blows." As real-world uprisings rage and our shared journey towards Web3.0 accelerates, global consumers are busy forming new types of alliances.
For the last 2.5 years, we have lived with a pandemic, a huge mess, fear, and uncertainty, but it also brought a bunch of new values. As our collective priorities move from immediate concerns of survival physically and mentally to larger social, planetary, and technological inequalities, people are exchanging individual desires and demands for group consensus. As a community or so-called "collectivism," a sustainable future becomes a fundamental principle. Looking towards 2030, people will co-exist with brands and Web3 communities in new ways.
Look at your grown-up kids. I'm looking at mine and understand that we are facing a mass reorganization. United by values of empathy and community, the young generation of consumers are shunning individualism in favor of alliances that are decentralizing industries and redistributing power at scale. Brand leaders & marketing executives must reconsider the relationships between brand and what a brand does, risk and investability. Losing their sense of individualism, the generation which today is in its early 20th is engaging in new forms of collective thinking, doing, and consuming.
In response, brands will need to shift from sellers to coordinators, blurring the boundaries between how we define things in terms of brand mission, back to community and general consumption and choices.
Change Is Inevitable.
One thing that is clear in our world, and at Sarine, is that things are ever-changing. We embrace the creation of an eco-system across the whole pipeline. We know that data helps design better and more intuitive products and services.
It is about helping industry players and companies improve by creating new knowledge and offering new ways to provide full transparency of the processes behind every specific diamond purchase (if it's rough to trade or polished for consumers). It is about giving companies a comparative advantage to find efficiency and drive change. It's about challenging the industry & thinking differently & using the incredibly advanced network we've got, and challenging what the industry can and needs to do.
What’s Next for the Sarine Brand?
Just a week ago, I returned from Cannes Lions Creative festival, where I could catch up on all the important insights and analysis and see all the winning creative marketing work. "Being creative is like a workout on a muscle; the more you train, the sharper you are," –wisely said at the Cannes stage.
We will continue to grow Sarine's positioning as an industry trendsetter, evolve with the times, and help other diamond companies to do the same and meet their customers where they are. The Sarine brand is an enabler; this is the certainty of direction, to change and to act toward that, to support companies that understand the sustainability change and help them to use tech tools to achieve their goals.
Sarine's brand definitely started to match community-centric thinking with community-centric actions and create an eco–system. The question is, does your company have certainty of direction?
As for the new Sarine campaigns in social or Metaverse or web.3? Just stay tuned...
