The Wall Street Journal reports in an article titled, How jewelry followed fashion’s lead by Christina Passariello, there’s a trend in the jewelry business to embark on the tactics and strategies that make the fashion industry successful. Such as, looking for celebrity spokespersons, developing multiple product offerings at various price points, launching major ad campaigns, and having a trendier outlook on design. The article reports:

Luxury jewelry houses once took an understated approach to marketing. But increasingly, jewelers…are acting like fashion designers, embracing trends and courting celebrities. And like fashion houses, they are speeding up design and production cycles and introducing the idea of seasonality, in some cases launching several new collections a year…The trendy turn comes at time when fashion designers are expanding their own lines into expensive jewelry.

The article paints a picture of both industries, that of fashion and jewelry, that are intertwined, somewhat crossing paths. While fashion designers are expanding their brands into perfume, accessories, and jewelry, jewelry designers are expanding their offerings into that of fashion and accessories.

One example of this overlap reflects our pop culture obsessed world:

The increasing overlap between the worlds of fashion and jewelry is reflected in their advertising. Jewelers traditionally eschewed supermodels and celebrities, instead running ads filled with sparkling product closeups. Chopard is breaking with that tradition this month, when it starts running print ads featuring the supermodel Eva Herzigova. Italian jeweler Casa Damiani SpA has tapped Gwyneth Paltrow and Jennifer Aniston for its campaigns.

I think this "overlap" deals with a trend of brands trying to create a lifestyle product. Brands want their customers to come to their store for a one-stop-shop, but that is not how most consumers work. Many people don’t desire to be a head-to-toe Cartier or Louis Vuitton dressed person that is why fashion is so fickle. People go to different brands for different things. And once these companies realize that they can't give their clients everything, they will be more successful in achieving a balance that won't lead their brand to saturation.

And with such ambitious dealings and expansions by these companies, they can saturate the market and take away the one thing that makes their brand, especially in jewelry, special: the concept of exclusivity and luxury. And once that feeling of having something special, one-of-a-kind, and exclusive is taken away, their core customers, “the big-ticket-item clients” will go elsewhere.

Still, some analysts question whether Cartier's efforts to follow fashion trends…could turn off big-ticket-item clients. "It might have the negative effect of diluting the cachet of jewelry," says Lehman Brothers luxury goods analyst Richard Stroud. But other analysts think jewelry's trendy tactics will continue: Branded items currently contribute only about 15 percent of the jewelry and watch industry's $125 billion in revenue, leaving plenty of room for brands, and brand-marketing, to grow.