How Vivaldi Built the World Gold Council’s “Speak with Gold” Global Communications Platform

Jewelry

The Challenge

The World Gold Council faced fragmentation in its messaging, with different regional offices creating divergent communication strategies. Without a unified platform, efforts to position gold as a brand were diluted and inconsistent.

The Opportunity

Vivaldi, led by branding expert John Diefenbach, explored gold's 5,000-year history and symbolic significance, surfacing gold's role as a medium of connection across cultures, generations, and values. The brand strategy revolved around the theme of "connectivity," resonating across markets and demographics.

The Outcome

Vivaldi developed a global communications platform centered on connectivity, culminating in the positioning "Glow with Gold" — which evolved into the international "Speak with Gold" campaign, giving the Council a unified global voice for gold across cultures and markets.

World Gold Council Case Study Summary

The World Gold Council engaged Vivaldi to resolve fragmentation across regional messaging that was diluting how the Council positioned gold globally. Vivaldi, led by branding expert John Diefenbach, explored gold’s 5,000-year history and symbolic significance to anchor the brand strategy around connectivity, culminating in the positioning ‘Glow with Gold’ which evolved into the international ‘Speak with Gold’ campaign and gave the Council a unified global voice across cultures, generations, and values.

About World Gold Council

The World Gold Council is the global market development organization for the gold industry, headquartered in London. Its members include major gold mining companies worldwide, and the Council promotes the use of gold across jewelry, investment, technology, and central banking sectors.

Frequently Asked Questions

What did Vivaldi help the World Gold Council achieve with the global communications platform?

Vivaldi built a unified global communications platform anchored in the theme of connectivity, deployed across international markets through the ‘Speak with Gold’ campaign. The platform replaced regional fragmentation with a single voice for gold that resonated across cultures, generations, and values while still leaving room for regional execution.

How did Vivaldi build a global gold platform around the theme of connectivity?

Exploring gold’s 5,000-year history surfaced a consistent symbolic role across cultures, which is gold as a medium of connection between people, generations, and values, and that role was specific enough to anchor a campaign while broad enough to translate across markets. ‘Glow with Gold’ captured the emotional register first and then evolved into ‘Speak with Gold’ as the campaign expression, which is the right sequence for a category brand positioning.

Why does the gold industry require a unified global communications platform?

Gold competes for share of wallet against equities, real estate, and other stores of value, and against other categories of jewelry, in every market where the Council operates, and regional offices generating their own messages cannot create the global brand for gold that the competitive picture requires. A unified platform compounds the Council’s investment across markets, while fragmented regional messaging spends the same money to less effect.

What can other category trade bodies take from the World Gold Council approach?

The transferable lesson is that category brands work when the platform is anchored in the meaning the category genuinely owns across cultures, not in messaging designed to flatter the member companies. Trade bodies that build the platform from member preferences end up with internal consensus and external invisibility, while ones that build from cultural meaning produce campaigns that actually move category demand.