Organizations and Markets

The Business of Weddings

2 February 2007 at 12:11 am Peter G. Klein 6 comments

| Peter Klein |

The wedding business is a $70 billion industry in the US. Vicki Howard’s Brides, Inc.: American Weddings And the Business of Tradition (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2006) explains how it got this way. Janice Traflet’s review for EH.Net focuses on the industry’s great marketing achievement:

As Howard expertly highlights, it was no easy task for businesses to supplant certain older wedding practices (which often held religious and ethnic significance) with newer ones that held more profit potential for them. Doing so required the creation of “invented traditions,” to borrow historian Eric Hobsbawm’s phrase. To make new practices (like diamond engagement rings and the groom’s band) acceptable and desirable, the wedding industry needed to make them appear as if they were rooted in ancient customs. At the same time, the industry also sought to subtly encourage the public to jettison practices that were not conducive to growing their businesses — such as the bride wearing an heirloom ring or a handed-down dress.

But the book does not support the Galbraithian image of consumers as hapless dupes. Notes Traflet:

It is interesting to contemplate (as Howard does) the degree to which consumers had the power to accept or reject the wedding industry’s “strategies of enticement,” to borrow William Leach’s term. Howard insists, “Women, who were understood to be the main consumers of wedding-related goods and services, were not mere victims of advertising and merchandising campaigns, nor did they simply accept wedding industry advice uncritically” (p. 5). In one example of a failed “invented tradition,” the male engagement ring never caught on, in part because it was unable to transcend contemporary gender mores. Howard also emphasizes the ways in which women, not just men, historically have been involved in marketing wedding products and services.

Don’t get me started on Galbraith, the celebrity “economist” who didn’t know any economics. As Murray Rothbard aptly observed, “Galbraith’s entire theory of excess affluence rests on this flimsy assertion that consumer wants are artificially created by business itself. It is an allegation backed only by repetitious assertion and by no evidence whatever — except perhaps for Galbraith’s obvious personal dislike for detergents and tailfins.”

Entry filed under: - Klein -, Business/Economic History, Recommended Reading.