One of the dirty little secrets of the wedding press is that the oft-repeated statistic that the averge US per wedding spending is approaching $30,000 is really a lie.
Last May in a blog post titled “Lies, damned lies and statistics”, I pointed this out using recent figures from The Wedding Report. Using The Wedding Report’s own data I shared that over 80% of the weddings in their data set spent less than half the amount they reported as “average”.
Recently, Christina Fredrichsen of IntimateWeddings.com directed me to a Wall Street Journal article “Weddings Are Not The Budget Drains Some Surveys Suggest” which further exposed this problem and even interviewed some of our profession’s leaders who work to perpetuate the spending falsehood.
It is not that I am against lux weddings and upscale brides. The troublesome issue with the misleading wedding cost reports is that the reports are purposefully packaged to misrepresent and oversell wedding professionals and brides-to-be misinformation as to the cost of the typical wedding. This can cause many problems for both the brides-to-be and wedding professionals.
How many wedding professionals decide that their best business plan is to cater to the “upscale” bride? Weddings with budgets above 30K. And invest in expensive marketing to execute that business plan? And go out of business only to find that they were marketing to less than 5% of the market? And ignoring over 80% of the US weddings.
And think about the young couples feeling stressed because their budget seems so much less that what they read on The Knot or in Conde Nast. And possibly go into debt just for what they have been told is the “average” wedding?
In today’s new economic reality I feel that for most wedding professionals it would be much better to positionand market to serve the majority of the marketplace. What could be called the “Wedding Populaire” or even Volks-Wedding. The idea of the average wedding trying to reach an almost unaffordable level of extravagance is no longer stylish … or possible.
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About Marc
Statistics like these are difficult at best. Should a survey be what does the average person spend on a wedding or what is the overall average costs of all weddings. Depending on how you read that, it could mean the same thing or totally different things. Is a multi-million dollar celebrity wedding part of the bell curve? That could easily skew the “average wedding cost” but it is certainly not the typical spend of the “average person”.
Kerry Garrison
http://L7Studios.com
Thank you for sounding the whistle Marc!
We spent less than $2,000 on our wedding and it really was a very beautiful wedding – everything you would hope for in a wedding.
We ended up writing a downloadable book to teach other couples with financial restraints (that’s most of us!) how to plan their own on-budget, financially responsible Dream Come True Beautiful Wedding.
As we tell others about our wedding, the knee-jerk reaction from some people (and perpetuated by some servants of the wedding industry) is that our wedding must have been somehow deficient.
They don’t have a reason for thinking this – it is just an assumption they make based on how much we paid. The truth is that a creative bride and groom who place limits on their budget and creatively consider how they can still reach their goals can produce what most people would consider an average or above-average wedding (we’ll just let them assume that we spent $30,000! )
Thank you for your enlightening article.
Have a great day!
Tim and Lisa Spooner
Authors of “Wedding Planning on a Budget”
http://www.WeddingPlanningOnABudget.com
That WSJ article is over a year old.
When it’s all over, the only thing left is the dress and the pictures. And I suggest trashing the dress to get even more cool picures.
[...] Branding and positioning. A time for change. As I have pointed out in other posts wedding budgets were never what was so often presented so you need to be sure that your branding positions you for the true spending patterns you want to [...]