Why Facebook should do it?

 

Considering Facebook mission of connecting people and considering wedding planning involves finding the right kind of people for various activities in a wedding, Facebook definitely can be the platform of the same.

 

Clarification & Assumptions

1. I am assuming that we are talking about the facebook mobile app because it already has a section around events which can be improved further for deeper event planning too.

2. I am assuming that we are talking about the process once two people have found each other and have decided to get married

 

User Segments

1. People who are getting married

2. Family of people who are getting married

3. People who are supposed to attend the wedding [Friends, extended relatives, colleagues]

4. Wedding suppliers [Event Management, Location, Catering, Deco, Beauty]

For moving ahead, I would be taking people who are getting married as a segment considering they do the much of planning

 

User Needs

1. Getting RSVP from friends, relatives, colleagues

2. Getting suppliers for activities

3. Negotiating with suppliers

4. Budget tracking

5. Fixing the location [visiting]

 

Prioritizing Needs

1. Low – This is an important need but Facebook already supports the same through events

2. High – Discovering the right supplier is always a challenge and also the most time taking as the experience of wedding is entirely dependent on that. It also plays into Facebooks strength.

3. Med – This can be taken care during the discovery as you typically discover people in your budget range

4. Low – This the least of the pain point for a user and typically is taken care by due diligence in need 2 & 3

5. High – This is an important step and with now pandemic hitting has become an area of concern.

I would be moving ahead with the need 2 around discovering suppliers as it is a major problem area and takes the most part of planning time

List of Possible Solutions

1. Auto Suggest possible vendors in the event page

2. Ability to seek recommendation from guests/friends

3. Ability to post need for suppliers as per activities with option for suppliers to reach back

4. Ability for suppliers to create deeper profiles [ upload schedules, photos, ratings]

5. Ability for suppliers to have cross platform presence and can connect cross platform( facebook, Instagram, whatsapp)

 

Prioritise Solutions

1. Effort -high, Impact – high

2. Effort – Low, Impact – Med

3. Effort – Low, Impact – high

4. Effort- Low, Impact – med

5. Effort – Low, Impact – low

I would like to choose option 2

 

Capabilities for MVP

1. Ability to post a need for an activity let say catering with relevant information dates, tentative budget, location, type of cuisine

2. Ability to enhance deeper supplier profiles with the above options

3. Once the post if made, matching algorithm and notification system to suppliers to reply back to the post, while replying back relevant information around rating, past works needs to be added by the supplier

4. Option to whatsapp / messenger call the supplier

5. Checklist to mark what suppliers are in place and what are pending

 

Where it will be launched ?,

It will be part of the creating an event flow.

Metrics

1. Number of weddings planned

2. Number of matches of supply & demand

3. Check metric – Number of weddings posted without this flow

When we say wedding planning, there are different parts of this process.

1. Exploring and choosing suitable vendors from the market
2. Exploring different wedding ideas and choosing the suitable ones.
3. Wedding management of making sure all the chosen services are provided ensuring the quality.

Let’s consider vendor selections as a problem for us and consider different users groups who would need this kind of solution

1. The Bride and Groom
2. Parents and family members
3. A wedding planner consultant

 

Let’s take “The Bride and Groom” as our target user group and understand their problems and needs

 

1. They have to find each vendor individually.
2. They have to reach out to vendors individually.
3. They have a budget constraint. 
4. They want to explore interesting wedding ideas.
5. They want vendors who have a good service track record.
6. They want to compare different vendors and choose the one who suits their needs.
7. They lack an understanding of how the wedding is planned and how different vendors operate.

 

Let’s take a few of the user needs and solve for them. i.e 2,3,5

 

1. Users will be able to enter their budget and location and choose the services they want to take from the wedding planner interface on Fb.
2. User will also be able to select a priority level for each of these services i.e High, Medium and low. This priority will indicate that for the user which service has higher priority over others in terms of quality of service. If a user wants everything best in class user can select a High priority for all the services.
3. After choosing all the preferences and searching for vendors, users will be suggested with a vendor for each service considering the priority, budget and user rating.
4. Apart from the suggested vendor, the system will also give a set of vendor options under each service, if users want to choose a vendor other than the one suggested by the system.
5. User will be able to see the ratings, review and price range of the vendors.
6. User will be able to bookmark selected vendors.

 

 

I’ll start by thinking about who are the customers interested in a wedding planning experience within FB.

1) People getting married 2) People who are helping the couple getting married (friends, family) 3) Wedding services biz owners (photographers, makeup artists, designers, event planners etc). 4) Recently married people

Let’s take a step back to think about broader business goals. Why would FB invest in this?

1) Increase *deep* engagement among its audience by serving a specific use-case (wedding planning)

2) Offer opportunities to connect to business owners, thereby providing biz owners highly qualified leads and increasing ad revenue, and potential transaction opportunities.

For this exercise, I’ll focus on #1.

Thinking about the needs of our users 1,2.

1)  Planning a marriage can be highly stressful, FB community/network has people who’ve been through this. Asking for help/recommendations would be easy, and it would be easier to trust word-of-mouth recommendations.

2) Wedding day needs to be perfect, I want to browse through many options via photos, videos, reviews, maybe even schedule a in-person before finalizing on vendors.

3) I want it to be easy to keep in touch with wedding guests and keep them updated on what to expect before the wedding

To prioritize the above, we want to conduct user interviews from the specific personas and identify the most painful aspect of wedding planning. FB as a platform has a lot of tools to enable #1 and #3 but #2 seems to be core of what’s missing, and most essential to introduce a new experience. In terms of importance to FB vs customer value, #1 lends itself to some engagement, but takes users outside the FB ecosystem, #2 could drive high customer value and high engagement, #3 is part of the experience and seems lower customer value and lower importance to FB.

Diving into solving for the 2nd usecase, here are some ideas to explore:

1) Introduce Wedding Planning as a new experience via marketing channels, especially targeted at users.

2) Offer various categories of what might entail a plan with various vendors in categorized buckets

3) Within each vendor page, enable photos, videos, any reviews(the ones from within the network highlighted more closely), and an ability to use Messenger to reach out to vendors

4) Offer checklists of what goes into a wedding planning, along with Instagram images for inspiration.

5) Partner with wedding planning experts and offer to match consumers with them to help them throughout the process.

#2 and #3 could be content that is easily setup with some machine learning and human curation. For a MVP, we could handpick categories that have the most amount of high quality vendors and good content. Success at the MVP stage would be to get a set of consumers through a successful wedding and have them recommend the experience to their other friends. With FB’s mission to connect the world, and its platform strengths of pages, recommendations, messenger, marketplace tools, starting with curated trusted content that can paint a wonderful magical picture for the couple that is intended to be married soon is key.