The Perfect "white" Wedding

Like many others, I tend to research blogs that not only speak of the wedding industry but go into further depth about how weddings tie in with the advertising industry. I stumbled upon a wedding blog posted in the Woman's Studies Program done by The University of Pittsburgh.  In the article the author describes how every wedding magazine, billboard, tv show and even gossip magazine has plastered the idea about how a perfect "white" wedding should appear. They talk about the Christian nuptials, followed with the dream reception by the beach and finally ending with the beautiful white couple driving away to their Happily Ever After. Almost all of these types of ads show women who are Caucasian characters. However there is a large chunk of a potential market that the multi-billion dollar industry is forgetting, the Hispanic and black population. The industry, stated by the author, claims that they target around 78% of whites and Asians to marry, but only target 67% of Hispanics and around 42% of blacks in America. We have to ask, why they are forgetting this large portion of the United States population? I mean every race gets married, and more and more couples are having inter-racial marriages.

Isn't it the goal of businesses and industries to relate to ALL of their consumers. According to the census in 2011, almost 30% of the United States population is made up of Hispanics and black Americans. To me, that's a large piece to just "miss." I also believe that more people would relate to wedding advertisements if they showed more realistic weddings. Like I said before, there are more inter-racial marriages, different cultural marriages and finally a trend that has been slowly emerging, gay marriages, that advertising needs to adapt to. What is this perfect "white" wedding that the industry has caused us to spend more then our salaries can afford to reach?

To end, I believe the wedding industry must enter the 21st century of globalization and cultural assimilation and revamp their advertisements and hinder away from the perfect "white" wedding to the perfect "dream" wedding.