I had lunch yesterday with friend of Think, Ashley King of Ashley’s Bride Guide.  Much of the conversation revolved around Fairy Dust and Pink Unicorns. It’s really scary how much Ashley and I think alike.

First up, Fairy Dust.

All you need to do is advertise with me and you will have all the brides you want.

You hear this from just about every sales rep you meet.  They know your marketing budget is small and they want all of it.  Sadly, you also hear it from the talking heads that represent the major players like the Knot and Wedding Wire. The truth is that no one place is going to do it for you, you have to spread your exposure out as well as you can and have it all point to the one place you truly control: your website.

All you need is a Facebook page.

No, again your Facebook page is just a sign post to your website. If you post all your content on Facebook they have no reason to go to your site and all that traffic goes to Facebook, not you. Facebook is important, don’t get me wrong, but it is only a piece of the puzzle

The Wedding industry is recession proof.

Wrong. While it is true that people will keep getting married, even that is less true than it used to be. There as been so much written about this, including a lot of it on Think, that I won’t bore you with it. Beyond that, the amount that couples spend is directly effected by the economy. When people are struggling to pay their mortgage and put gas in their car they aren’t going to spend $500 on a custom aisle runner or card box. They are going back to basics, back to what matters.

If you offer low end alternatives no one will buy your high end offerings.

Really? Nothing could be farther from the truth. Why would you purposely leave money on the table? More importantly, if you give budget brides a gateway into your offerings if they find extra money they may well buy your higher priced items.

Pink Unicorns

It was interesting that it isn’t only me that hears the constant cry of, “I only want to do luxury weddings.” ~sigh~

Long before I started writing on this public blog, back in the days when Think was subscription only, I began trying to dispel this myth. Yes there are some really high end weddings in America, but no where near enough to support every vendor that is chasing them. Yes the weddings that brides see in the major blogs tend to be high end.  Yes, a large group of brides want a Style Me Pretty wedding but not many can afford it. The problem is that when it comes time to write the check to make those weddings happen, very few (and shrinking) can actually ante up. When faced with the cost, most regroup and back way down.

Here is one more point you may want to consider. The really high end weddings, a quarter of a million and up, are being planned and designed by the people that have been planning and designing for that family or peer group for years. Not someone they found on the web.

“Wait! ” you say, “I want the $100,000 to $200,000 weddings.”  That market, the upper middle class, is the one that is shrinking faster that all others.

A recent article in the Wall Street Journal was addressing how giant Proctor and Gamble is restructuring to match the new realities and had this little tidbit.

In the wake of the worst recession in 50 years, there’s little doubt that the American middle class—the 40% of households with annual incomes between $50,000 and $140,000 a year—is in distress. Even before the recession, incomes of American middle-class families weren’t keeping up with inflation, especially with the rising costs of what are considered the essential ingredients of middle-class life—college education, health care and housing. In 2009, the income of the median family, the one smack in the middle of the middle, was lower, adjusted for inflation, than in 1998, the Census Bureau says.

The slumping stock market and collapse in housing prices have also hit middle-class Americans. At the end of March, Americans had $6.1 trillion in equity in their houses—the value of the house minus mortgages—half the 2006 level, according to the Federal Reserve. Economist Edward Wolff of New York University estimates that the net worth—household assets minus debts—of the middle fifth of American households grew by 2.4% a year between 2001 and 2007 and plunged by 26.2% in the following two years.

P&G isn’t the only company adjusting its business. A wide swath of American companies is convinced that the consumer market is bifurcating into high and low ends and eroding in the middle. They have begun to alter the way they research, develop and market their products.

Does that last sentence remind you of any high end wedding gown designer? It should, it’s exactly what Vera Wang is doing.

So what does this mean to you?

It certainly doesn’t mean you should give up, I am not trying to spout doom and gloom. It means that you may need to rethink your goals in light of what is really going on with your target market. Is there a way that you can offer some product to the lower end bride?  It is really smart to put all your marketing drive into getting a market that is evaporating?  There is money out there to be made, it just may not be where it used to be.