Luxury is not what it used to be. It is now clearly defined as the satisfying of some aspirational needs within the consumer and no longer simply products or services in a price band affordable only by a few. Almost any product or service can be ramped up into a luxury slot today.
The jewellery industry, for some reason, has for long depended on high intrinsic value in its product to define what it terms luxury. This has resulted in it losing ground substantially to a variety of other products – particularly high end electronics – that it didn’t even perceive as competition until they started eating away at market share.
In gold-crazy India, it was assumed for long that no matter what the price, Indian women would go on buying gold jewellery, driven by some special compulsions that defied all the rules of consumer behaviour. A major part of this assumption was based on the fact that in India, jewellery has been an investment vehicle for millennia. High gold prices actually spurred greater jewellery consumption – itself driven by social and religious buying impulses that were insulated from the vagaries of the consumer marketplace.
The advent of globalisation has rewritten all the rules and last year, the Indian jewellery industry came face to face with rejection by the consumer. While still considered an important investment vehicle, gold is now treated by the Indian consumer more as the commodity it is and less with social and religious reverence. Rising gold prices in 2007 saw a lot of business going to bullion dealers and noticeably less to the jewellery industry.
When the fine jewellery manufacturers and retailers wondered what had gone wrong, they noticed one jewellery segment that had seen the changes coming, and had quietly developed as a market phenomenon over the last decade. One-gram-gold jewellery fulfils every criterion the new definition of luxury dictates. It is well designed, comes in sizes that validate the need to display, and actually gives the wearer a touch of pure gold, satisfying that inner Indian craving.
In keeping with the new definition of luxury, one-gram-gold jewellery has also evolved into providing product assurance and instilling confidence in the consumer, as our cover story reveals. In one-gram-gold jewellery, one sees the essence of the spirit and innovation that will carry the jewellery industry into the future. It replaces the dependence on intrinsic value with the intangibles that are increasingly important to today’s consumer. One-gram-gold jewellery epitomises the sort of thinking that will ensure the jewellery industry’s survival. |
