Samit considers including “Experiences” in the priority list of the wedding planners, a need of the hour. He tries to explain does experience means in the realms of the wedding planning business. He pinpoints the five major drivers for delivering a quintessential experience:
- Venue
- Décor
- Food & Beverage
- Hospitality
- Entertainment
How do you create an experience?
The best kind of events is where the guests transcend into a spectacular journey for next 4-5 hours and are mesmerized by the surprises unfolding for them at each step. To create such spectacular experiences which no one has ever seen before, the wedding planners need a perspective. One needs a bird’s eye view and look everything from the top and then decide what to put together, how to engage the guests, and how to captivate the audience in an awe all across. The best event of a wedding Planner is mostly the one they have enjoyed the most experientially.
The art of story-telling
The competitive environment that we live in today, a mistake the wedding planners might end up doing is trying to counter and supersede the work of fellow competitors and trying to do the same thing better than them. Instead, one should focus on being able to deliver a story in their creations and all will accordingly fall into place to create spectacular experiences. The art of storytelling is critical to position the wedding planners on top of the pyramid. This art needs to be adopted at the strategy level. Wedding Planners need to be thoughtful, imaginative, original, and bold to be able to create clutter-breaking experiences. The intent and endeavor should be to move forward so that the industry could develop.
India is a highly important part of the global experiential business economy, thanks to the Indian Weddings which are taking this industry overseas in terms of volumes and money spent. India enjoys its position at the top of the pyramid when it comes to the experiential business globally and is a major contributor to the experiential economic society. To continue this streak with much more highlights, it is important that the wedding planners revive themselves as story-tellers.
Do we challenge ourselves?
It is important to challenge oneself to maintain a certain position in the line of business and grow from thereof. At times, the professional might become complacent. As Samit says, “When we kind of have made sure that our bread and butter is taken care of, we start to forget about cream and cheese”. Complacency is a sense in our being, which should actually not be there.
Wedding Planners should regularly check:
- Are we doing it right?
- Are we being smart?
- Are we being global?
- Are we marrying destination, venue, people, purpose, status, nature of the event etc. together to create a breathtaking experience.