A fanciful story on what might have been if a certain wedding planner had really understood their customer and their behaviours on the day they visited.

Romeo and Juliet.  A good read even though it had a sad twist at the end.  They deserved better.

Just think, if Bill had been in a different mood, would Romeo & Juliet have had a fairytale ending, complete with a lavish Montague-Capulet wedding?

Ah yes, you can see it now.  A young couple in love, him looking like the fella from “Titanic” and her looking like the lass from “Homeland” wandering around Giovanni Lewis with their wedding list.  Then it’s off to meet with the wedding planner at Il Relais della Locanda.  That’s got to be the dream couple for any wedding planner, right?  I mean, they’re clearly head over heels in love and only too keen to sign up for whatever it takes to make it the society wedding of the century.

But wait, the wedding planner doesn’t know that R&J had a falling out on the way over, all because of an off the cuff comment that our leading lady made about the seating arrangements: she wants Paris to sit a little too close to the top table for Romeo’s liking.

Oh dear. It’s all simmering away under the surface but the young couple’s trying not to let it show at the meeting.  And the wedding planner hasn’t picked up on the mood so ploughs on, throwing her best sales pitch at the couple.  It’s like watching a car crash in slow motion…

Later on, the poor wedding planner is sat with the hotel manager trying to make sense of it all.  How did it go so wrong?  Surely it was a done deal: the best hotel in Verona (all those top ratings on TripAdvisor aren’t for nothing), is the only sensible place for the big event.  It was the perfect sales pitch, delivered with all the right words, tone and body language.

Fanciful stuff perhaps, but it happens every day in the B2C sector and not just for our wedding planner.  And it’s something that we’re fascinated by.  So much so that we’ve spent more man-hours than we care to count exploring the psychology of consumer behaviour.  The new taster sessions and the full programme explain what’s really going on and why it’s sometimes easy to engage with some customers (and why it’s not so easy at other times).

More importantly, we explain what you can do about it so that your sales story doesn’t turn into a tragedy.