Here comes the brand: Wedding media and the management of transformation

Abstract

We interrogate how strategic management discourses intersect with the image of the bride as she is addressed and presented in wedding media. By examining celebrity magazines, bridal self-help forums and Living TV's Four Weddings, we argue that wedding media's explosive growth is linked to a rise in branding culture and its exploitation of women's apparent aspirations for visibility. Wedding media branding appropriates romantic narratives of traditional femininity, such as achieving the perfect bridal look and finding and marrying ‘the one’. Simultaneously, it offsets and validates this traditionalism through associating the spectacle of wedding consumption with the self-determining power to manage transformation.