Developing A Brand For Your Wedding Part II: Thinking Like An Auteur

So last week, we defined what a brand was and how it can be separate from marketing. To continue helping you develop a brand for you wedding, we’re going to help you try and think like an auteur. Typically the term “auteur” is used to refer to a filmmaker (usually director) who’s influence on the film is so great, all of the film’s little pieces (cinematography, musical score, how the actors performed) is considered to be a direct result of their vision.

If that’s seems a bit intimidating, don’t worry. No one expects you to become Francis Ford Coppola just because you’ve decided to get married. Instead, for the purpose of branding, try to put into practice something you’ve probably done for some time already: imagine your dream wedding.

Remember the questions we asked last week?

What colors do you see most prominently (other than white, we mean) at your wedding? Perhaps the men in the wedding party are all wearing the traditional black blazers but all have matching light blue vests? Perhaps this is matched with the women in the wedding party all wearing sleek and silken dark purple dresses? Sounds almost like a jazz or roaring twenties theme. Are there any other parts of the wedding that match the color scheme? A white alter with blue and purple cloth spread in between the grooves? Table clothes? Wedding invitations with a light blue background?

So the question becomes, what are you dreaming right now? We’d start listing every individual thing that can be applied to wedding branding, but this would become less of a blog and more of a novel. How many pieces of a wedding can branding be applied to? Everything.

Everything?

Everything.

From a high-concept standpoint, the draw distance is your imagination. From a logistics one, it’s how much of the budget you’re willing to devote to it –in the sense that you can hire a company and or a graphic designer that’s specially works in branding, like the one we linked above or others like Mia Maria and Ribbon & Ink. If that doesn’t seem appealing to your wedding budget, you can always mitigate costs by being personally involved in the branding process early on.

“Mitigate costs”, you say?

Here’s where pre-planning between you and your partner is critical. If the two of you are looking to be auteurs for your wedding, if you’re looking to apply an overall theme or tone, it’s going to be much easier if the two of you decide on everything before you start hitting all the vendors and (most importantly) the wedding planner. Discuss and write out ideas for the theme of your wedding. It’s perfectly okay is this is a list of jumbled ideas in the beginning. You can work out the presentation later. The goal is to decide on generalized things like colors, fonts and tone. The two of you may have already decided on a particular theme (roaring twenties, classical books or even Star Wars, for example). In that case most of your planning work is already done because you’re essentially borrowing the aesthetics of other brands to make something of your own.

Bring these ideas to your wedding planner as early as you can –consultations visit if possible. If you and your partner are auteurs, then the wedding planner will be the producer that puts these ideas into action. As the three of you go about contacting all of the vendors or shop around, it will benefit everyone to be working off of the same script as early as possible. Most wedding vendors these days take great pride in their ability to customize to their client’s needs or at the least offer a wealth of choice. As all of the pieces come together, you’ll find that you’ve completely skirted the costs of hiring a professional wedding brander or graphic designer by directing all of the vendors into creating the tone and theme of your wedding into something real and cohesive. That is how the vision of a brand becomes a reality, and the practice of doing so, if in fact directorial auteurship in action.

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