Event Plan: Finnish-Singaporean Cross-cultural Wedding

Abstract

This work is a product type thesis and the outcome of it is a Finnish-Singaporean Wedding Plan. The product was created to help an intercultural couple to plan their wedding in Finland and take into consideration elements of both cultures. Author of the thesis was approached by the Finnish-Singaporean couple and asked to act as their wedding planner. The aim of the work is to create an informative, useful and inspiring event plan that can be used by the couple to organize their wedding. The Plan includes a lot of visual examples for a better understanding of suggested wedding style. The Wedding Plan will be evaluated by the mentioned above couple. This wedding plan can also be used as a template for other cross-cultural, and not only, weddings as it takes into consideration different cultural aspects and suggests many ideas on wedding implementation.

The theoretical part of the thesis is focused on event management, wedding planning, and cultural dimensions’ studies. In addition to that, the author has a good experience and knowledge of wedding industry as she worked for an event planning company in Italy. The author divided the theoretical background of her project in two parts: Event Planning and Impacts of Cultures on Weddings. The first part focuses on Event management and Wedding planning studies, and the second theoretical part is based on Hofstede’s cultural dimensions theory. The methods that were used in this work are the desk research and the qualitative interview conducted with the Finnish-Singaporean couple.

The Wedding Plan is based on the author’s Framework. It includes the most essential wedding elements, sources that help to support it from the theoretical point of view and comments by the author. To create the Wedding Plan File, the author has used Canva – a graphic design tool. In the Wedding Plan, author collected the most important details that couple would need to know to implement their wedding. The plan includes vendor suggestion list for each wedding element that is stated, useful information and webpages, tips and various mood boards for a better illustration.

The final product includes information and suggestions on: wedding ceremony type, documentation, wedding venue, wedding reception, catering, wedding cake, floral decoration, music, wedding colours, invitations, wedding attire, bridal look, and budget. All suggestions that are presented in the Wedding Plan were influenced by Finnish and Singaporean cultural aspects, thus, many small details were taken into consideration to avoid any cultural misunderstanding.