Abstract
Despite the surging growth and huge economic contribution, the wedding industry in India lacks the attention of researchers and quality literature. Underpinned by technological enhancements, social media influence, changing consumption and marketing paradigm, this research is an attempt to explore the impact of such change in relation to the current wedding industry. The size of the industry would vary in as many sources as you explore. The Industry encompasses many sub-industries like travel, hotel, food, clothing, entertainment, decor, photography, make-up and so on. Subsequently, it is hard to set a figure around the size of the Industry. A conventional Indian wedding celebration would involve couples, and their respective family and friends to plan and manage the entire show. However, the industry has witnessed a significant drift in relation to emerging trends of hiring wedding planners, use of technology and social media, in the past few decades. The inspiration for research begins, with researchers’ long trail of personal observations in and around close friends, family, and social circles. In this light, this paper seeks to address the specificity of the changing persona of the wedding industry in India and the effects of social media in this context. With the corresponding drifts of human behavior and marketing practices; accelerating use of dedicated social media such as LinkedIn, Airbnb, Couchsurfing and so on, this paper further represents an attempt to explore a business model of building a dedicated social media platform for the use of wedding planners and service providers in India. In this light, the researcher’s aim is to: Study the current Indian wedding industry size, challenges, and use of social media. Explore the need for a dedicated social platform and can the use of such a platform modify the process of wedding planning and management itself? How would the expansion of such medium collide with other traditional ways of wedding planning and management?
