We studied Nigerian weddings & were shocked

April 27, 2018

We wanted to understand the Nigerian Wedding Industry and people’s experience so we did a huge survey. Ultimately, we wanted the survey to inform our decision as to develop a platform for making the stressful process of wedding planning fulfilling.

The Wedding Survey by Lush Plans

The Wedding Survey Structure

After weeks of research and tweaking, we decided on a structure. The wedding survey was structured into 3 sections:

For people who have experience planning a wedding.
For people who have assisted or played a part in someone’s wedding plan.
For people who have never been involved in wedding planning.

Users get redirected to a page with tailor-made questions based on their response to the question, “Have you ever planned a wedding?”

Survey Goals

With the Wedding survey, we pursued 5 goals:

To learn about how people will prefer to invite others to their wedding
To learn how people find wedding vendors
To understand the biggest challenges of planning a wedding
To learn how different methods of invitation affect people’s attendance at the wedding.
To get the average time people need to make their wedding plans.

Demographics Summary

83% were single
71% of the response was from people between the ages of 20 to 30 years.
66% have never planned a wedding
61% of respondents were males.
22% has planned a wedding, and
12% partially helped to plan a wedding.

Survey Results

How do people want to invite guests to their wedding?

The results showed that people prefer to use printed Invitations over other means of invitation. In fact, over 76% of the respondents said they will use printed invitation. Some reasons why people chose printed invitation were because it is more formal, traditional and classy. It is tangible, can be flaunted, can be used as a keepsake. It also makes guests feel special.

Will married people who used printed invitation use it again if they were to redo their wedding?

Surprisingly, no. Not all married people who used printed invitations will use them again. For married respondents, the figure went down from over 91% to 66%. What happened here is that they learned from the experience and decided that as a replacement for invitation, they will email, SMS, social media apps, or apps.

What other methods will people use to invite guests to their wedding?

Although invitation by printed invites was a winner across the 3 groups of participants, other methods followed closely. People are willing to invite guests by texting them (SMS) or giving them a call. On average, more than 50% of participants said they that will be happy to invite guests to their wedding by either texting them or calling them.

With regards to how people like to invite guests, two additional figures caught our attention:

After Printed Invitation, SMS, Phone call, and a Social media direct message (DM) were the next highest rated options.
Most of the married couples who said they will no longer use printed invitations opted to use sms and phone calls to invite guests to their wedding.

How do people who are planning a wedding find wedding vendors?

The most predominant method is by asking family members, friends, and/or colleagues. People rarely went online to find vendors.

What is the hardest part of planning a wedding?

Across the board, Budget/financial constraints and logistics were highlighted to be the major issues.

Will guests be offended if you invite them with SMS, phone call, email or social media DM?

Around 90% of respondents will attend a wedding they were invited to via email or SMS. 60% of respondents will definitely attend. This is also dependent on whether the invitee is a friend, relative or acquaintance. 30% would not mind attending despite being skeptical. 10% said they would not attend if they were invited with these methods.

BONUS: How many months do you need to plan a wedding?

The 3 categories of participants were all asked how much time do you need to plan a wedding? It’s kind of difficult to answer this question because the response was almost evenly distributed between 0–3 months, 3–6 months and 6–12 months. Despite this, one thing we are certain of is that most people (More than 75%) believe that they need less than 1 year to plan their wedding. Narrowing the analysis down shows that around 35%, the largest, of participants across all groups, voted for 3–6 months. About 30% of married participants, however, thought that they needed 0–3 months. This leads us to conclude that 5 months or less is the time needed to plan a wedding. We believe that the sweet spot is 6months.

Next Steps

We are planning to attend Wed Expo on March 23rd-25th and we are looking to connect with the organizers of the expo before the day to see how we can share this survey with vendors.

If you see us at Wed Expo in Lagos and want to chat about the Survey Results or Lush Plans, please start a conversation. After the expo, we will be sharing stories about vendors we meet and about our experience at the Expo in a follow-up post.

Thanks for reading and go check out the Lush Plans website.

TL;DR

People prefer to use Printed Invitations then SMS.
Experienced Married people who used printed invitations for their weddings recommend other methods like like SMS.
People who have never planned weddings are looking to use Printed invitations for their weddings.
SMS, Phone Call, and Social Media direct message are the top three new methods people will invite guests to their wedding.
Majority of people will attend a wedding even if they do not get invited with printed invitation.
People are willing to use an app that will help them plan their weddings.
People do not primarily find Vendors online