Getting people to show up to your wedding is a marketing strategy
In summer 2019, my brother, Jon, and his fiancee Portia announced that they were going to finally have a big wedding. They had already done a small ceremony at the Justice of the Peace in Rochester, NY in January 2018, but had been wanting to throw a big party for Portia’s family. Portia is originally from Iran and met my brother when she was studying abroad in Ohio (both of them were studying Chemical Engineering at Case Western). Portia especially wanted her grandma to be able to see her wedding.
Because of issues between the US and Iran, neither person could host a wedding in their home country and still have both families show up. Portia had been saying for a while that the wedding date would depend on when she got her green card (it would be ASAP after that), and she had her eye on Dubai for winter or Armenia for summer.
Please, please, please, be Armenia, I thought. For the sake of my wallet. It hurts thinking about Dubai.
I got my wish, and they decided to have the big wedding in Yerevan in September 2019.
Everyone on both sides got about two month’s notice for this.
This was not a problem for Portia’s side of the family– they just booked a charter bus from Tehran, set aside a block of hotel rooms, put her older sister in charge of planning the details, and called it a day.
In the US, people were a little harder to convince. Jon and Portia were too burned out to program a wedding webpage or send paper invitations, so they just sent an all text e-mail out to the family mailing list.
“You know no one is going to take this seriously, right?” I pointed out. “This e-mail has so little detail people aren’t even going to know if this is a real thing.”
So as my wedding present to them, I designed a webpage with travel information about getting to Armenia, booking hotel rooms in Yerevan, and how to dress for a Persian wedding (like you’re going to be walking the red carpet at an awards show or the Met Gala in the US, basically).
Since I was living in NYC at the time, I took a trip to the Metropolitan Museum of Art for inspiration designing the wedding invitations so that the design would say “Persian mythology”. One of my favorite things about living in the city was having that kind of resource– I used to also go there to get ideas for things like opera costumes I was designing. I spent hours walking around the Persian wing of the museum looking at artifacts from thousands of years ago and getting a sense for how to reference that style visually.
I ended up drawing a picture of a Huma Bird for the invitations:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Huma_bird
(It’s probably important to note that Portia’s family is not Islamic; they still observe Zoroastrian traditions).
On the back of the invitations and on the RSVP cards, I included a picture of a pomegranate, which is an important part of Persian cuisine. At this point, my family sent out paper invitations with a hand-drawn Human Bird on one side, and the web address for the page on the other side.
People who had not previously considered going to Yerevan with almost no notice immediately gained an interest in the trip because of this.
My favorite story about the results of this “marketing campaign” was hearing about how my Aunt Monica put the invitation on her mantlepiece and couldn’t stop looking at it over and over again. Eventually Uncle Don said, “You really want to go to that, don’t you?” And this resulted in her deciding to go instead of dismissing the e-mail that had no real information in it.
At the rehearsal dinner, I finally met Portia’s sister, who had been planning everything in Armenia during the previous months. We joked that she was the director of this event and I was the producer because “I put butts in seats”. I had basically approached this wedding like any event promoter in NYC would approach the task of selling tickets.
Not only was the wedding a spectacular success, but everyone who made the long flights from the US was happy to discover a part of the world they wouldn’t have seen otherwise! To this day, they’re still raving about what a great experience that was.
My favorite part of going to a Persian wedding was all the dancing. None of the Americans could speak Farsi, and most of the Persian guests had fairly limited English, but dance became like a universal language between both sides. This was the only wedding I’ve ever been to where people couldn’t even wait until after dinner to get on the dance floor! The party went late into the night, and everyone from the smallest children to Portia’s grandma was on the dance floor. When they had to finally leave because the DJ was gone and the hotel staff needed to clean up, they kept dancing on the bus back to the hotel. It was the most joyful, life-affirming attitude towards dancing that I’ve ever seen in my life, and I’ve made costumes for professional dancers.
If you ever need to promote an event that’s expensive and difficult to get to, try putting a mythological bird on the promotional materials!