The Diamond Producers Association (DPA) was an international marketing and advocacy organisation founded in 2015 by seven of the world's largest rough-diamond mining companies. Its stated purpose was to stimulate and sustain consumer demand for natural diamonds at a moment when the category faced a confluence of structural pressures: the rise of laboratory-grown diamonds, shifting generational attitudes toward luxury spending, and the long shadow cast by the conflict-diamond controversies of the preceding decade. In 2020 the organisation was reconstituted and rebranded as the Natural Diamond Council (NDC), a name change that signalled a deliberate pivot from generic demand promotion toward sustainability-led differentiation. The DPA's five-year lifespan was nonetheless consequential: it produced some of the most analytically sophisticated consumer research the diamond industry had commissioned in a generation, and it established a collective-action framework among producers who had historically competed fiercely for the same end markets.

Historical Context: Why the DPA Was Necessary

For most of the twentieth century, demand promotion for natural diamonds was effectively a De Beers monopoly responsibility. The company's Central Selling Organisation controlled the distribution of the overwhelming majority of the world's rough diamonds, and its advertising subsidiary — operating under the N.W. Ayer and later J. Walter Thompson relationships — produced campaigns that became cultural landmarks, most famously the 1947 slogan "A Diamond Is Forever," which Advertising Age named the most recognised advertising slogan of the twentieth century. That architecture of centralised promotion began to fracture in the early 2000s when antitrust settlements in the United States and regulatory scrutiny in the European Union forced De Beers to restructure its market operations. The company could no longer act as the industry's universal marketing engine without risking further legal exposure.

The vacuum this created became increasingly visible through the 2010s. Laboratory-grown diamonds — produced by High Pressure High Temperature (HPHT) and Chemical Vapour Deposition (CVD) methods — were moving from industrial and specialist gemmological applications into gem-quality jewellery at accelerating pace. Retail prices for laboratory-grown stones fell sharply as production scaled, and several prominent retailers began stocking them alongside natural diamonds with minimal differentiation. Meanwhile, consumer research in the United States, China, and India — the three markets that collectively account for the majority of global diamond jewellery consumption — suggested that younger buyers were less emotionally anchored to the natural-diamond proposition than their parents had been, and were more likely to interrogate the ethical and environmental credentials of a purchase.

It was against this backdrop that the seven founding member companies agreed to pool resources for collective promotion, setting aside competitive rivalries in recognition of a shared interest in the health of the natural diamond category as a whole.

Founding Members and Governance

The DPA was formally established in 2015. Its founding members represented a cross-section of the major rough-diamond producing entities operating at that time:

• De Beers Group — the world's largest diamond producer by value, with operations principally in Botswana, Namibia, South Africa, and Canada.
• ALROSA — the Russian state-controlled mining company and the world's largest producer by volume, with operations concentrated in the Sakha Republic (Yakutia) of Siberia.
• Rio Tinto Diamonds — operator of the Argyle mine in Western Australia (the world's dominant source of pink diamonds until its closure in 2020) and the Diavik mine in Canada's Northwest Territories.
• Dominion Diamond Mines — a Canadian producer with interests in the Ekati and Diavik mines in the Northwest Territories.
• Petra Diamonds — a London-listed producer operating historic South African mines including Cullinan, Finsch, and Koffiefontein, as well as the Williamson mine in Tanzania.
• Lucara Diamond Corp — a Vancouver-listed company operating the Karowe mine in Botswana, notable for the recovery of exceptionally large Type IIa diamonds including the 1,109-carat Lesedi La Rona in 2015.
• Gem Diamonds — operator of the Letšeng mine in Lesotho, a source renowned for producing large, high-quality diamonds at a relatively high average dollar-per-carat value.

The organisation was headquartered in New York, reflecting the primacy of the United States as the world's largest single market for diamond jewellery. Jean-Marc Lieberherr, a former executive at Rio Tinto Diamonds, served as Chief Executive Officer from the DPA's founding through its transition to the NDC. Governance was structured around a board drawn from member companies, with funding contributions scaled broadly to each member's share of global rough-diamond production.

Strategic Focus and Consumer Research

The DPA's approach differed meaningfully from the broad-reach mass advertising that had characterised De Beers's twentieth-century campaigns. Rather than leading with a single aspirational slogan, the organisation invested heavily in consumer research to understand how attitudes toward natural diamonds were evolving across its three priority markets — the United States, China, and India — and to identify the most persuasive points of differentiation for natural stones.

The research programme produced findings that shaped the DPA's communications strategy in important ways. In the United States, the organisation identified what it described as a "real is rare" emotional proposition — the idea that the natural origin of a diamond, formed over billions of years under extreme geological conditions, constituted an irreducible authenticity that a manufactured stone could not replicate. This framing was designed to address the laboratory-grown challenge not by attacking the competing product directly but by elevating the narrative around natural diamonds' geological provenance and scarcity.

In China, where diamond jewellery had grown from a negligible category in the 1980s to the world's second-largest market by the 2010s, the DPA's research identified a younger consumer cohort that associated diamond purchase with personal achievement and self-expression rather than exclusively with betrothal — a finding with significant implications for how diamonds were marketed to Chinese millennials.

In India, the world's largest diamond-cutting and polishing centre and a rapidly growing consumer market, the DPA worked to support demand among a middle class whose purchasing power was expanding but whose cultural relationship with diamonds differed from Western norms, with gold jewellery historically occupying a more central role in gift-giving and ceremonial contexts.

The "Real Is Rare" Campaign

The DPA's most visible public-facing initiative was the "Real Is Rare, Real Is a Diamond" campaign, launched in the United States in 2016. The campaign was developed in partnership with the advertising agency Mother New York and represented a deliberate departure from the romantic-occasion advertising that had defined diamond marketing for decades. Rather than centring on engagement rings or anniversaries, the creative work addressed a broader range of emotional contexts — friendship, personal milestones, self-purchase — and featured diverse casting intended to reflect a contemporary American consumer landscape.

The campaign ran across digital, social, and traditional media channels, with a pronounced emphasis on digital platforms where the DPA's research indicated its target demographic of adults aged 21 to 40 was most reachable. The organisation also worked with jewellery retailers and trade partners to ensure that point-of-sale materials and staff training reinforced the natural-origin messaging at the moment of purchase.

Critical reception within the trade was broadly positive, though some analysts questioned whether a campaign funded at the DPA's budget levels — modest by comparison with the historic scale of De Beers's promotional expenditure — could meaningfully move the needle on category demand in a fragmented media environment. The DPA itself published consumer tracking data suggesting measurable improvements in certain attitudinal metrics among its target demographic in the United States, though independent verification of these figures was limited.

The Laboratory-Grown Diamond Challenge

No account of the DPA's work can be separated from the laboratory-grown diamond question, which grew more pressing with each year of the organisation's existence. By the late 2010s, major retailers including Signet Jewelers — the world's largest diamond jewellery retailer by store count — had introduced laboratory-grown diamond ranges. De Beers itself launched its own laboratory-grown diamond jewellery brand, Lightbox, in 2018, at price points deliberately set well below natural-diamond equivalents, in a move widely interpreted as an attempt to establish a clear price and positioning gap between the two categories.

The DPA's public communications on laboratory-grown diamonds were carefully calibrated. The organisation consistently avoided language that characterised laboratory-grown diamonds as fraudulent or inferior in their physical and chemical properties — a position that would have been scientifically untenable, since laboratory-grown diamonds are compositionally identical to natural diamonds and are recognised as such by the major gemmological laboratories. Instead, the DPA's messaging emphasised the distinction in origin and in the geological narrative attached to natural stones, arguing that this distinction was meaningful to consumers and would sustain a value premium for natural diamonds over time.

The Federal Trade Commission's 2018 revision of its Jewelry Guides in the United States — which removed the word "synthetic" from the recommended descriptor for laboratory-grown diamonds and broadened the definition of "diamond" to encompass laboratory-grown material — was a regulatory development the DPA monitored closely, as it had implications for how the two categories could be distinguished in consumer-facing communications.

Transition to the Natural Diamond Council

In June 2020 the DPA announced that it would rebrand as the Natural Diamond Council. The name change was more than cosmetic. The NDC's stated mandate placed greater emphasis on sustainability, responsible sourcing, and the socioeconomic contribution of natural diamond mining to producer communities — themes that had grown substantially more salient among luxury consumers during the preceding years and that had been amplified by the broader conversation around environmental, social, and governance (ESG) criteria in investment and consumption.

The rebranding also reflected a recognition that the phrase "natural diamond" itself needed to be established as a distinct category descriptor in consumer consciousness, rather than assumed as the default meaning of the word "diamond" — a default that the proliferation of laboratory-grown stones was actively eroding. By incorporating "natural diamond" into the organisation's name, the NDC signalled that the definitional battle was as important as any advertising campaign.

The founding membership structure was broadly carried over into the NDC, though the organisation's composition has evolved with changes in the industry landscape, including Rio Tinto's exit from diamond mining following the closure of the Argyle mine in November 2020 and the sale of its Diavik stake.

Significance in the Broader Gem Economy

The DPA's formation and subsequent evolution into the NDC represents a significant episode in the political economy of the gem trade. It demonstrated that even fiercely competitive mining companies could identify a shared interest sufficiently compelling to sustain collective action — a model with potential relevance to other gem categories that face analogous challenges from synthetic or simulant alternatives, or from reputational pressures around sourcing.

The organisation also contributed to a broader professionalisation of the diamond industry's engagement with consumer research and digital marketing. Its investment in understanding generational shifts in consumer attitudes — particularly among millennials and Generation Z — produced data that informed not only its own campaigns but the strategic thinking of retailers, manufacturers, and other industry participants.

From a gemmological perspective, the DPA/NDC's work underscores a point that practitioners have long understood but that the broader public often does not: the value of a gemstone is never purely a function of its physical properties. It is also a function of the stories, associations, and cultural meanings that accumulate around a material over time — and those meanings require active maintenance, particularly when competing materials with identical or near-identical physical properties enter the market. The DPA was, in essence, an organised attempt to maintain and renew the cultural capital of natural diamonds at a moment when that capital was under genuine pressure.

Further Reading

• GIA Gems & Gemology — Laboratory-Grown Diamonds: A Market Overview (2018)
• GIA Gems & Gemology — Natural vs. Laboratory-Grown Diamonds (2020)
• American Gem Trade Association (AGTA) — Industry Resources