Wansum Li – Intro to Marketing

When I think of Costco, I think of massive shopping carts filled with crates and crates of merchandise. It seems that you can find almost anything there, from food, to furniture, to electronics, to personalized wedding invitations.  Costco’s next step: wedding dresses. I wouldn’t normally associate wedding dresses with Costco, but Costco’s rationale is that some brides-to-be don’t want to spend hours at upscale bridal boutique or spend big bucks on a dress they will only wear once.

I wonder if this is a substantial enough target market for Costco to be successful. With so much pressure to make one’s wedding day “perfect”, I wonder if brides will go for a “discount” dress. Not that I have personal experience to draw from, but it seems that many people look forward to the experience of searching for that perfect dress; it is the idea that no cost is too great for a bride’s wedding day. Perhaps people will be open to the Costco bridal line as a way to save costs or have more money to spend on, say, a honeymoon. But will people want to advertise that their dress is from Costco, even if it looks similar to other designer dresses on the market? Costco has positioned itself so well as a volume discount brand; do people want to associate their wedding dress with the sane place where they purchase their ten jumbo cartons of juice every week? Maybe Costco will the secret wedding dress destination that everyone knows about, but no one talks about. I’m interested to see how consumers react to Costco’s new wedding dress line.