Modern Jewelry Trends

How much does the average wedding cost today? Some recent surveys have suggested that it’s about the cost of a car. Three recent highly-publicized surveys placed the average cost between $26,800 and $28,800. Of course, the surveys were conducted by The Knot, Conde Nast Bridal Media, and Wedding Report and the members and customers of these businesses are more interested in an elaborate wedding than the general population. (Those who opt for a civil ceremony or an impromptu elopement would bring down the average but they aren’t surveyed.) The Knot, the online wedding community, has the widest reach of the three: of the 2.2 million weddings last year, almost 40 percent involved members of The Knot. But the percentage responding to the survey is a small fraction of the number of members as a whole. The average cost of the weddings organized by the 2,014 members who responded to the survey was $27,400. But, as a recent article in The Wall Street Journal pointed out, this average is a mean: the costs of all the weddings is added up and divided by the number of respondents. This kind of average is easily skewed by a few super-expensive weddings. (If 54 weddings were under $10,000 and one was $1 million, the mean would be $28,000.) The median cost of the weddings surveyed: the response in the middle, with as many higher as lower, was $15,100. The median for the Conde Nast survey was $14,182 and the Wedding Report Survey was $14,400.

Let your customers know that half of the couples who are involved in planning the perfect wedding spend less than $14,000. Easing the peer pressure to spend the normal amount of $27,000 may free up some of the budget for the most important symbol of that union: the wedding bands. Too often, wedding bands are an afterthought, a last minute choice that the groom, in particular, is willing to economize on. According to the Wedding Report, in 2006 consumers spent only $1,739 on wedding jewelry, which they will wear for the rest of their lives. Compare this to $1,841 on wedding attire, $2,337 on their Wedding Ceremony, $1,104 on favors and gifts, $1,136 on flowers, $922 on music, $2,659 on photography and video, $13,692 on the reception, $809 on stationery, and $563 on transportation. When couples think about how long they will wear their wedding bands and how they symbolize their promises, they may decide to spend more on a symbol that will last long after the cake is eaten and the centerpieces wilt.

This entry was posted on Friday, August 31st, 2007 at 3:53 pm and is filed under Consumer Pulse. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.