The Wedding Experience is a mock wedding, and not a bridal expo. This is a 5hr wedding starting with ceremony and going through: cocktail, dinner, dessert, and dancing. Eat a full 4 course meal, have unlimited beer & wine, and win prizes for both the groom & the bride. We will also have a guide available online, mobile, and on a native app for iPad/iPhone & Droid. It will have a unique matching system to pick the best vendors for you based on the criteria you fill out on our questionnaire. Watch and experience what this is all about:
More Information:
Simon Blanco
360-771-8745
weddingexperiencepdx@gmail.com
Purchase Tickets October 27th 2012 @ Benson Hotel:
Many vendors have posted in the past on Facebook that they don’t pay for referrals, and that no one in the wedding industry should expect to pay. There might be a small group of professionals out there that work together that don’t charge each other, but that is definitely not the norm. The norm actually is people “Pay to Play” and it typically starts with the venues (but not all) with their “preferred” vendors list. The reason they recommend the vendors on their list is because each one of them paid hundreds, even up to $2,500 to be on a preferred list, or charge a percentage like 10-15%. This can mislead the bride because when the brides are asking for an opinion they want a real answer, not one based off of monetary gains. We all hate how lobbyist use millions to change laws in our Government, and paying to be preferred doesn’t mean anything except for the fact that you payed to be on their list. Some venues will even charge the client extra for choosing an “outside vendor,” the extra charge is so overpriced they just stick with the Preferred list because it’s cheaper.
With our other business we have chosen not to pay to be on lists in Portland. As a result MEGA Music Entertainment is only recommended by 3 venues. Sometimes when we do a wedding at a venue we are not preferred at we run into problems with the management & some of the staff in charge. They will intentionally make things harder for us to do our job in hopes that we look bad, and I wish I was making this up. We have had a manager tell us that our setup looks ugly, and takes up too much real estate, so we should take it down (even though our client hired us specifically because of our setup). I have had a very popular venue not call me back even though we have called 3 times & left 3 emails, but they have preferred DJ’s, so I don’t get any response back. I did a walk through with the clients and the weddings & event coordinator would not talk to me, and left as soon as she could. This is a high-end venue and I expected higher standards, but when money is involved, I guess I can’t expect much . . . it’s politics. The whole point of everyone’s job is to help the client as best they can, and money should not effect service.
If you are a bride that is looking at the list of “Preferred Vendors,” there is a good chance that the people on that list are paying to be there in some form, or doing “trade.”
We chose to go above and beyond with our guide by actually providing a commercial for all of our wedding professionals. Women watch more video than men! It only makes sense that we provide a video of your business for them to watch. 90% of people change the channel when a commercial comes on for either TV or radio. Think about it, how many channels do you have as a “back up” channel the moment a commercial comes on?
Well it turns out that the only time that people actually watch a commercial is when they go to a website to get more information. If the video is good enough people will watch it over again and pass the link on to friends. In fact it turns out that people will turn to You Tube to try to find even more video on the business that they are searching for. So it pays to have a commercial, but not the the standard 30-60sec that you get on TV or radio, you need to have something that is 3-5min to give the kind of information that the client is looking for.
We had clients who looked at video that was 30 & 60 seconds long. We had up to 40 videos for them to view, and after they were done watching them we asked them basic questions about what they liked & didn’t like. The overwhelming majority of our brides liked the video, but said it was not enough information. They said they wanted to watch something that explained everything they wanted to know in 5min or less, but it had to be full of the information that they wanted. If it was too boring, or not informational enough they would just click on something else. This makes sense because when a vendor watches a commercial they are not trying to extract information, they are just watching. If you are a bride who is looking for the information, you will pay very close attention to that video, and play it again if there was something that you wanted to double check.
This might be radical thinking, but when you stop and think about yourself, what do you prefer? I know I look for video, so does my wife, friends, and family, but only when I am looking for the info. I will spend extra time looking for video, or watching video if it has the information that I’m looking for.
Please check out our first commercial of Holland Studios:
When telling people about the Wedding Experience they love it. There are so many things that are different with the Experience compared to other events, people have a hard time remembering everything that makes it different. In this list you can see the real difference between the Wedding Experience and your typical show side by side. This way people can make a real comparison and understand the difference.
The key goal of the Wedding Experience is to interact and get more intimate with clients. A common theme found from both the wedding professional and the engaged couple was this: both could not communicate the value of the company & services with a 10×10 booth. Clients wanted to go to a wedding or event to see the professional in action. The business owner complains that the clients will never be able to understand what kind of time and effort they put in to their wedding compared to other “vendors.”
The event is going to showcase the best of the best. The only way that they could be shown in the best way is by letting them do their thing. The clients gets to see them in action, get to hear them talk, and experience what makes them stand out. By the end of the event it’s no longer a questions of who they want, they just experienced the best and have to have them!
