Do We Really Need Yet Another Wedding Industry Awards?

It’s point­less launch­ing a new wed­ding indus­try awards event!

We already have enough high pro­file wed­ding indus­try awards — there’s Wed­ding Ideas Mag­a­zine (the one which gets in the press), The Wed­ding Indus­try Awards (the one with the fairest-but-not-foolproof vot­ing sys­tem) and The Wed­ding Indus­try Experts Awards (where sup­pli­ers can all vote for each other if they’re friends on twitter).

Does any­one really care about awards any­way? I don’t mean busi­nesses — yes, it’s nice to have ‘award-winning’ next to your name. But I don’t think many brides and grooms are choos­ing sup­pli­ers based on tro­phy col­lec­tions alone. And with more and more awards events com­ing along it just dilutes the mean­ing of the exist­ing awards.

So why on earth are they doing it?

Money.

The awards events aren’t for your ben­e­fit, lovely brides and grooms. They’re not even for the ben­e­fit of all my won­der­ful wed­ding sup­plier friends. They’re not for the good of the indus­try. They’re lin­ing pockets.

Busi­nesses pay to enter awards.

Adver­tis­ers pay to fea­ture on the awards asso­ci­a­tions’ websites.

Tick­ets to the glitzy events cost hun­dreds of pounds.

The more busi­nesses enter or are nom­i­nated, the more vis­i­tors flock to a web­site to vote. The more sup­pli­ers share links in their face­book sta­tuses, the more vis­i­tors flock to a web­site to vote. The big­ger the web­site becomes, the larger its power and recog­ni­tion… and the more every­one wants to be involved with a hyped-up awards ceremony.

Oh, and the more mag­a­zines peo­ple buy. And the more likely the busi­nesses are to adver­tise in those magazines.

Is there any harm in hav­ing all these wed­ding awards fly­ing around?

I actu­ally sus­pect there is!

Last year I saw the pres­sure on busi­nesses to enter some of these awards cer­e­monies. I saw friends work­ing hard to pro­mote the awards and ask­ing their past cus­tomers to take time to give feed­back for them, and vote.

It takes a lot of time for a busy wed­ding busi­ness to pre­pare for an awards event, with invest­ment in social media and online pro­mo­tion using up those pre­cious hours we save to spend with our families.

Most wed­ding busi­nesses are very small — craft busi­nesses from jew­ellery to cou­ture wed­ding dresses and sta­tionery as well as pho­tog­ra­phers, stately homes and florists tend to have only a few peo­ple work­ing for them. Can they really afford to enter wed­ding awards com­pe­ti­tions? And for what… a glass tro­phy (which I’ve heard has to be bought!) and an online badge?

At a time when the wed­ding indus­try as a whole is in decline and bud­gets are falling from an aver­age £20k+ to closer to the £10k mark, wed­ding sup­pli­ers should be cut­ting costs to pro­vide the very best ser­vice they can at afford­able (but real­is­tic) prices. This means focus­ing on what’s impor­tant — and that’s you.

The best wed­ding sup­pli­ers don’t enter awards

Elite wed­ding sup­pli­ers rarely enter wed­ding awards com­pe­ti­tions. The mas­ters of their trade, the skilled crafts­peo­ple who’ve been pro­vid­ing a top class ser­vice for brides and grooms for years — they rarely enter. They don’t need to. Their work speaks for itself.

So brides, grooms, don’t choose your sup­pli­ers for their awards badges. Choose them for their prod­ucts, the qual­ity of their ser­vice, and because you fall in love with what they do.