Wedding Mechanic

The Wedding Squeeze July 24, 2008

For most men little thought goes into life after proposing to the woman he loves, let alone planning the wedding itself.  In fact if men knew how much time and effort was needed to plan a wedding, they might propose to elope instead.  Soon after the engagement, friends and family naturally ask when the wedding date is.  The tale of excitement begins and everyone wants to become involved and before the couple realize it, the wedding has begun to take on a life of its own.

Most women take a senior role in wedding planning while men tend to sit back, smile, nod and agree with things that they have no idea about.  Women buy bridal magazines and window shop for ideas, meanwhile the mental arithmetic is ticking over amongst the men and the horror of trading in the sports car to finance the wedding start to emerge.  Men begin to apply the brakes and the real discussions commence.  Even once the financial discussions are over and a shared understanding is reached between the couple of what the wedding may look like, the real planning is yet to come.  With the budget is set and the philosophical doctrines of religion and ceremony are out of the way, the task of organizing and preparing the myriad of intricate details set in.  The supply of wedding planners makes planning a wedding easier for the higher end of town.  Wedding directories assist in chasing down wedding providers which requires a lot of phone calls and back and forth emails.  In our current political climates more and more women are critical resources in the work place.  Time to make the wedding phone calls and write the emails are at a premium.  Hence the stress builds and the joy of planning a wedding suddenly loses its lustre. 

In the combat against spam, governments have introduced laws to prevent the proliferation of electronic choking of email inboxes.  Strangely is has opened up some new markets, including the wedding providers market.  Companies using email marketing are using an opt in form of advertising where consumers sign up for newsletters.  Real estate companies use email alerts to great effect to alert prospective buyers of new property listings.  In the same way, wedding providers are being sent email alerts of upcoming weddings from couples planning their own wedding.  Kiss the Bride is one such company that offers a free service for couples to send email alerts to wedding providers around the country in Australia.  Kiss the Bride is different from a wedding directory where couples laboriously search through a “yellow pages” style on line index.  Instead, couples simply leave their wedding details with Kiss the Bride via an online web form and wedding providers are sent alerts.  This means that busy women planning the own wedding can leave their details and wedding providers will contact them either by phone or email.  Effectively, responsibility to secure bookings is placed back on the wedding provider to provide competitive quotes for couples.  

Luckily for the men, planning a wedding doesn’t need to be complicated and stressful.  The blissful blind ignorance of a wedding proposal can now be limited with opt in email alert companies such as Kiss the Bride  to save time and the stress of planning a wedding.  For wedding providers, it’s a new market.  By law, many of them provide a privacy policy and an unsubscribe facility to terminate a subscription ending the annoying plethora of follow up emails. 

The future of the wedding market will be interesting.  With further companies such as Kiss the Bride emerging, wedding providers will need to be more and more transparent with their pricing since couples will have several offers on the table to choose from.  This will inevitably squeeze the market and present wedding consumers more leverage with their cash.