Why the Royal Wedding Matters :: Part 1

The Royal Wedding is coming up next Friday, and even if you don't care about it personally, from a business perspective, it will influence weddings for at least the next twenty years. Knowing how this one wedding will shape consumer behavior will help you plan better for your wedding business in the years to come.

The Royal Wedding is a light, but not shallow, break from a world filled with heavy news. 

The April 11th cover of Newsweek carried the headline: "Kate the Great: In a World Gone to Hell - thank God, a Wedding."

The college students turning 21 this year (they were born in 1990, nine years after Diana and Charles tied the knot, in case you'd like to feel old) have never known world news that hasn't included a war: Iraq under George Bush, Kosovo under Bill Clinton, Afghanistan and Iraq again under George W. Bush, and now Libya under Barack Obama. They lived through September 11th and its aftermath at a young age. Add to that the natural disasters: Hurricane Katrina, the horrific tsunami of 2004 and the recent earthquake/tsunami in Japan. Now that they're graduating college, they're trying to find jobs in a rebounding though still uncertain economy. It can seem at times that we are indeed living in a world gone to hell.

The Royal Wedding, which is not a shallow topic since it's an event celebrating legitimate joy, is a guilt-free break from a world filled with heavy news. In the next decade, as these students get married, their weddings will most likely reflect many of the same emotional values that they witness in the Royal Wedding. In addition, many of today's students grew up in families that didn't incorporate a lot of tradition into their daily lives and that is something that many want to change as they start their own families. Whichever traditions Kate and William choose to embrace will heavily influence couples looking to start new (to them) traditions in their own weddings.