Janus Thinking

The diamond industry is in love with Tiffany.

Witness this analysis from Diamonds.net of the way that Tiffany avoided ‘doing a Burberry’.

In 2002, with $120 silver bracelets rushing off the shelves, Tiffany’s CEO Kowalski raised the prices on all of its most accessible collections, including ‘Return to Tiffany.’ The increase was not a response to rising costs or a desire for higher margins. It was a marketing decision intended purely to reduce sales.

This sounds like madness if you are a salesperson, but if you understand brand, and the difference between marketing and sales, it makes perfect strategic sense.

Problematically, the price rises had no discernible impact on sales. So in 2003 and again in 2004, Tiffany drove prices even higher. Finally, with prices up by more than 30 percent, Kowalski achieved his goal: Sales of jewellery under $500 finally began to decline.

Kowalski had saved his brand, increased his margins and build a sustainable platform the future.

John Hood, a professor of the Italian renaissance and 17th & 18th century European art history at Oberlin College, has remarked on a past syllabus about how connoisseurship, the sophisticated appreciation and contemplation of objects, is no longer an academic ideal. His definition of connoisseurship is a good one:

Connoisseurship is actually a technical term that encompasses the range of practices by which one tries to establish the status of a work of art as an object. Connoisseurs, therefore, try to figure out a particular object’s date, its material structure, its provenance or history of ownership, its maker, and so forth. Thus connoisseurship is the central and most important tool for any curator in an art museum. In fact, only the museum’s standards of connoisseurship determine the quality and importance of its collection.

But regarding the academic popularity of connoisseurship, he notes:

In Art History departments throughout the English-speaking world today, words like “style,” “masterpiece,” “quality,” and “beauty” carry many, mostly negative, associations. Of all such academically unfashionable terms, however, none enjoys a worse reputation than “connoisseurship.” … Until the 1970s, some training and expertise in connoisseurship was part and parcel of advanced education in most of the nation’s major graduate schools of Art History. Since then, however, deprecating connoisseurs and their practice as elitist, imperialist, sexist, or even racist has become chic, at times even de rigeur, for art historians who like to count themselves among the shock troops of the methodological avant-garde.

Indeed, other scholars agree. Judith Keller, the associate curator of photographs at the J. Paul Getty Museum, said in an interview published in the December 2004 issue of art on paper magazine:

[Connoisseurship’s] importance has been reduced within the art market, but I don’t hold the market entirely responsible for this. When a collector is looking at work, the people who are presenting that work should be connoisseurs themselves, and should be able to speak to the merits of the work. But an entire generation hasn’t gotten this instruction at the university level. The teaching of connoisseurship has been enormously reduced in the academic world, where theory rules. It’s simply not about the object anymore.

If it’s not about the object anymore, then what is ‘it’ about? As Hood suggests, political correctness and the rise of multiculturalism and postmodernism may account for some of the reason for connoisseurship’s academic decline. American conservative commentator George Will decries the scourge of postmodernism in a Newsweek column on connoisseurship from 2001:

Connoisseurship assumes that high-quality art is rare, rather than equally common to all cultures. Connoisseurship assumes that excellence in art can be defined and identified by scholarly judgments that are more than political acts or manifestations of cultural biases. Connoisseurship assumes that esthetic values have ethical force—that high art is elevating, that it pulls those who comprehend it up from the everyday. … All this offends the postmodern sensibility: the idea that enlightenment requires effort is unacceptable because it means that it is not equally “accessible” to everyone.

But in a rebuttal to Will’s piece in Salon Magazine, David Raskin, an assistant professor of art history, theory and criticism at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, notes that connoisseurship and postmodern sensibilities aren’t mutually exclusive—contemporary connoisseurship just has a new purpose:

Originally, museums were the private collections of noblemen. They were designed to protect and ensure the value of the art these collectors acquired. They were not open to the public, and histories were written around promoting the value of the specific art within them. Nowadays museums understand the value of art not in terms of dollars, but in the furthering of a shared tradition. They are concerned with building a shared culture, not one built on nostalgia for a long-dead past.

The modern purpose for connoisseurs then, in addition to appreciating and understanding art and “matters of taste,” is to further shared traditions and cultures. How connoisseurs go about doing this today in a non-academic, luxury-related context will be the subject in our next and final post in this connoisseurship series.

As we’ve mentioned before on Janus Thinking, Tiffany is a company that seems to be doing it right. There’s a fine line between courting young consumers with lower prices (to make buying Tiffany a lifelong habit) and devaluing the brand (putting off older customers or making younger customers think Tiffany is something they grow out of), but Tiffany has thus far been able to toe the line successfully. We mentioned Tiffany’s marketing strategy of raising prices to reduce demand earlier this month; last week the New York Times ran a story about Tiffany with a similar theme:

I credit the store for its gentle displays here: the most inexpensive rings — prices start at $1,090 for a ring with a round .18 carat diamond — seem to be presented in the clearest, brightest lights. This is not intended to make these rings seem bigger; rather, it makes them appear to be just as important as the icebergs down the counter — say, the round 10.5 carat diamond ring that sells for $1.12 million.

Indeed, the Tiffany ethos of making customers feel special is part of the reason why people think so highly of Tiffany and the blue box. That “fuzzy feeling” people get when they buy Tiffany is extraordinarily valuable:

While Tiffany has sold millions of diamond engagement rings, many of its customers would pay a surcharge for the blue box because it represents trust and quality. What most people want when they celebrate their marriage is the manufacture of perfect memories, and for them the blue box is as essential a part of the wedding tradition as a white veil. In the marriages I’ve observed that began with a blue box, there is a kind of assurance that buying your ring at Tiffany inures you from bad marital juju, as if the union were protected by the Good Housekeeping seal of approval.

This type of emotional connection certainly gives Tiffany a leg up against the competition.

This Valentine’s Day, did you think ‘Tiffany’ for your special someone?

Allied Diamonds, a Janus Thinking group company, believes that people who buy diamonds should not just be diamond customers, but rather they should be diamond connoisseurs. The connoisseur understands the nature of diamonds and truly appreciates them — when one can make the perfect purchase for the object of his affection, his happiness will match the love represented by the diamond and the eternal nature of the diamond itself.

A diamond connoisseur is able to distinguish the good from the bad, and the road to connoisseurship begins by understanding the anatomy of a diamond and the 4Cs of diamond evaluation. But that’s just the beginning. The connoisseur must see many, many diamonds in person and compare them side by side and under different lighting conditions in order to compare brilliance, fire and other aspects that make a diamond breathlessly beautiful, and it won’t be a rushed process.

We hope this guide will help you to become a connoisseur of diamonds as you search for the perfect diamond for you and the object of your affection.

Download ‘Diamonds 101’ (PDF)

I recently came across an article about marketing by Louis Cheskin and L. B. Ward, originally published in the Harvard Business Review in 1948. In discussing the difficulties of marketing nearly 60 years ago, it’s interesting to see how there’s still a lot to learn about customer preferences. Participants in their study made unexpected choices: when asked to pick “the best” or “most beautiful,” their answers were different from what they said they would choose for themselves. Could the same be said for diamonds?

I would ask the following questions:

1. When you are offered a selection of diamonds, which one is the best?
2. When you are offered to select a diamond for use, which diamond will you select?
3. Will you select the same diamond in each case?

I doubt it. Beauty remains in the eye of the beholder, with respect to different situations and different purposes.

In our series so far on Connoisseurship, we’ve discussed the definition of connoisseurship (post 1), the aspects of an object the connoisseur engages with (post 2), and connoisseurship’s academic legacy (post 3). This post is about sham connoisseurship.

The idea that luxury is in the eye of the beholder is one we’ve discussed before on Janus Thinking. Items that people consider to be luxury goods do not necessarily need to be expensive; all luxury is personal and relative, and a good’s quality, price, and how it makes the buyer feel should all be taken into consideration when evaluating luxury.

But is it possible to become a connoisseur of things that aren’t high art or ‘matters of taste’? Can one become a connoisseur of items that provide ‘luxury’ for the masses? I believe the answer is yes, but the rules of connoisseurship don’t change.

Connoisseurship requires an intense interest in the subject; it requires research, analysis, discipline, and hard work. The connoisseur doesn’t put on airs, or use his knowledge to show off. The Oxford Companion to Art (1970) makes this clear:

The possession of a sound body of knowledge gained by discipline and hard work in the service of aesthetic values together with the will and the power to advance them without regard to personal or mundane considerations is the special characteristic of the connoisseur.

For masstige and inexpensive luxury items, the lower barrier of entry for access to the object must not lower the standard by which the connoisseur evaluates and appreciates the object. But it tempting to think that something with a lower price doesn’t deserve proper scrutiny.

We look to artisanal breads and other products for an example. This recent post on ‘This Blog Sits at the Intersection of Anthropology and Economics’ about the artisanal movement makes reference to a ‘new connoisseurship’:

Artisanal products are not without a certain claim to sophistication. Artisanal salt, cheese, bread, these are all better than their non-artisanal equivalents, and any discerning palate can tell this is so. There is, in other words, a kind of connoisseurship at work. But it is a roomy connoisseurship. Unlike French wine, there are no rules and regs that constrain how something is served, how long it must breathe, or the food with which it may be eaten. There are no real demands for reverence. Artisanal foods can be served and eaten in any way. No special forks required. Artisanal food allows us be discerning without actually requiring us to learn anything. We get to be special without being specialized. To this extent artisanal food helps play out our expressive individualism.

I disagree with this idea. You might be able to instantly ‘appreciate’ a piece of fancy bread as you eat it, but that doesn’t immediately make you a bread connoisseur. You don’t know the composition of the bread, the type of flour used, the ratio of ingredients, the process used to make it, the type of oven, etc. It’s easy to appreciate the bread because it tastes good, but that doesn’t make you a connoisseur. Connoisseurship requires an understanding of the bread’s provenance. The connoisseur will be aware of the bread or other item’s ritual (the ‘rules and regs that constrain how something is served’), but only in a way that enhances the enjoyment of the item.

Sham connoisseurship is this idea that it takes no effort to become connoisseur. Becoming a connoisseur makes should take effort and contemplation, but it shouldn’t be difficult or unpleasant—the process of learning about an object one is interested in should be a reward in itself.

How modern connoisseurs take their knowledge and use it to customize and create experiences will be the subject of our next connoisseurship post.