Well, well, well.
The people in the Dignity press department are having a busy summer. Two national newspapers have published findings from the recent report commissioned by the funeral giant that operates under ‘over 500 distinct local brands with varying levels of local brand equity’ (source Dignity Investor Presentation June 2018).
Here’s a line from the article in the Daily Mail: ‘Around a third of funeral directors belong to chains such as Co-operative and Dignity, which commissioned the report and are not criticised in it.’
Apart from the pretty poor grammar, this is hardly a world shattering revelation – if you pay to commission a report on the industry you are a big player in, you’re unlikely to be seeking to find criticism of your own practice. No, this report is clearly part of the strategy to position Dignity as the leading industry provider of facilities and standards of care for the deceased, and is part of their response to the perceived threat to market share and ongoing ‘volume erosion’. As outlined in the Investor Presentation, ‘the combination of increased price competition and more demanding consumers requires a new approach.’
(That and the calamitous fall in Dignity’s share price precipitated by last year’s investment report by Beyond perhaps?)
And from the article in The Guardian ‘None of the 75 funeral companies visited by anonymous researchers for the report allowed access to their mortuaries.’
Well, why would they? How were these 75 funeral companies approached, and by whom? Would you want the funeral director looking after a relative to let a journalist have access to the mortuary where your relative was being cared for?
For the record, we ask all companies applying for Good Funeral Guide accreditation whether they would be willing to let clients or potential clients see the facilities where dead people are cared for. All would, with varying stipulations to ensure the privacy of the people in their care. And we go and visit them ourselves to make sure that we’d be willing to have one of our relatives looked after by each company we recommend.
Anyway, that’s by the by. Back to the Dignity PR.
Unfortunately, the ‘Time to talk about quality and standards’ report cited in the press doesn’t appear to be in the public domain, so there’s no way of knowing details of how the findings reported in the press were arrived at. Suffice it to say, the intended result seems to have been achieved, with Dignity positioning itself as the voice of the righteous, campaigning against shocking standards of cowboy funeral directors and calling for strong regulation of the industry.
In a statement earlier this year, Dignity CEO Mike McCollum said “We will also continue to demonstrate industry leadership by seeking the regulated market that will be good for clients and society and which plays to our strengths as a compliant and well managed business.”
Hmm.
The regulated market that plays to Dignity’s strengths is not quite the shape of regulation that we’d like to see being implemented.
Regulation in the right form is something to be welcomed, but regulation that would impose stringent barriers to entry into the funeral market (as intimated by Dignity as being the preferred option) is something to be resisted at all costs if, as a society we want to have the freedom to choose bespoke, creative and emotionally intelligent people to help us look after our dead.
Dignity have been undergoing an operating review with the help of LEK Consulting, which has resulted in a 3 year transformation plan involving separating front of house (client facing staff) and back of house (funeral directors, funeral service operators) to enable ‘specialisation and efficiency gains’. The former are involved with ‘client meetings and funeral arrangement, in branch pre need sales and viewings of the deceased’, while the latter are responsible for the collection and ongoing care of the deceased and the delivery of the funeral on the day.’
‘Optimisation of network footprint’ is another aim – involving rationalising locations with low performance or highly overlapping catchments and changing the operating model from 120+ networks with 5 branches per network to 70 networks with 10+ branches per network, and centralising operations where appropriate, e.g. mortuaries and fleet.
Investors have been assured that the Group has concluded that a future outlook of stable, comparable market share should be achievable through a combination of service, price and promotion, the latter illustrated by a key phrase from the Investor Presentation regarding future branding – the intent is for ‘marketing to promote Dignity’s commitment to high standards of care, quality service delivery and competitive entry prices’.
So far, so slick.
Congratulations LEK Consulting. And undoubtedly a nice welcome for the newly appointed but as yet unannounced Transformation Director who has ‘significant experience driving organisational change at major UK retailers’ and who will sit on the Dignity Executive board and report directly to CEO Mike McCollum.
The key message of Dignity being the saviour of standards in the funeral industry has been planted.
Time will tell whether bereaved families will be persuaded by the highly polished Dignity PR campaign, or whether instead people will seek out personalised service from local, independent, flexible and intelligent small businesses. The type of businesses where they can meet the people who will collect and care for their relative, have personal contact day or night with the owner, and know that their dead person won’t be shipped off to a centralised mortuary miles away.
We await the findings of the Competition and Markets Authority market study into the funeral sector with interest. As, we are sure, do the powers that be at Dignity PLC.
It’s pure panic! It was just a year ago the Mr McCollums wife was exposed for selling shares a few weeks before the shares in Dignity plummeted.
Their saturated market bubble has taken a huge blow because of “upstart” independent Funeral dorectors as Mr McClollum called them.
The public are speaking with their feet and at last not allowing the wool to be pulled over their eyes by false advertising from Dignity masquerading as their once successful independent acquisitions.
They are undoubtably a long with previous wolves of Reaper Street the primary source of Funeral Poverty and now are blaiming the more selfconcious independents for their shortcomings and misguided price hikes.
This bubble had to burst for them!
I agree that a level of standard should be expected from any service based profession and that starts with transparency, both of cost and then of practice.
Dignity have never made these two qualities a priority so why now? Because they themselves have been exposed.
As a past employee I have seen the ruthless and uncaring management techneques applied to keep their shareholders cash rolling in. This is just another PR stunt to make life tough for the smaller independent Funeral Director who can’t possible afford to pay the national newspaper chains to massage their needs.
Hi SHM I’m a journalist and would love to hear from you. Please reach out.
I find it absolutely immoral that in the report “Dignity has made its prices clear, but not everyone in our sector does,” along with “Our remaining will be added online before April 2019, ahead of the deadline proposed by our trade body of 2020.”
Time and time again at meetings with MP’s in Westminster and articles in the press, the accounts given by charities of funeral poverty and people getting into horrendous debt to pay a funeral bill, all went to branches of Dignity.
To imply that Dignity is transparent in their pricing, I find extremely distasteful and blatantly untrue.
Since my company opened in late September 2013, all of my prices were available online. Are they honestly saying that they couldn’t have their full price list online in under a month?
And then there is how they are planning on looking after people. You see someone in the office to arrange the funeral. Perhaps speak to them every day for two weeks (or in some cases, we know of people having to wait a month) and then on the day of the funeral itself, you meet someone you have never seen before to help you through the next few hours.
Did the person in the office mention there should be a flag on the coffin and the family will bring a photograph to be displayed. Did they tell them to remember the CDs? There are five CDs but two are duplicates just in case. Did they remember to tell that person that the coffin should be placed on the catafalque before people go into the chapel?
All of these little details come out during initial arrangements or over the course of the week when you are speaking to the client. These little details will undoubtedly get lost.
Then there are what amounts to mass mortuary “hubs.” To accommodate large amounts of people, I would safely assume these are going to be located on industrial estates.
If someone wants to see their person, they will then be driven to the local branch.
Industrialisation of funerals isn’t something I relish. It certainly isn’t something I would want for a member of my family. However, this may be exactly what some families want and find comfort in. A big, corporate, well oiled machine. Accept, from everything my clients have ever told me, it isn’t that well oiled.
I think the majority of the public would want to know their person is being cared for at the office they have chosen to visit. That the person they speak to and make arrangements with is the same person who is going to gently guide them on the day of the funeral itself and those little details won’t be lost. That they can pick up the telephone to any time of the day or night and speak to one of the staff or the owner of that company who know all the details rather than an anonymous call centre.
Anyone can commission a report and take what they want from it. However, this seems like a desperate attempt to position themselves to whisper in the ear of Westminster when legislation is drawn up so that the very people who are ethical, transparent and who have complete integrity are either forced out or prevented on starting and all because the shareholders need a return on their investment.
It’s the same old blather, the same old maximising our efficiency to benefit the needs of our families – and the same old motive. The Co-op reducing payroll costs to a frighteningly inadequate level and Dignity hiring bean counters to somehow counteract their Abismal performance on all levels in a bid to reassure investors!
Yet they still fail to understand that a great funeral service is provided by great funeral professionals. As for me, I am passionate about my work – I live and breathe it – and you can’t put a price on that.
The one thing I have learned over my 27 Years in this profession, is that the public are far more aware of the presence of the conglomerates – in whatever guise they choose to have. The big boys can have as many strap lines and mission statements as they want, but you still cannot beat personal service and the knowledge that your funeral director has treated “your loved one” with true dignity,care and respect.
Hi Kevin
Although this piece isn’t about “Quality and standards” and “Regulation” it is about the Dignity business
I’ve long since ‘had it’ with the constant media spiel that Dignity dispenses, Nothing other than a total smokescreen aimed solely for the benefit of City Institutions/Brokers/Pension funds etc etc. who are only interested in profits, reducing overheads plus a healthy balance sheet, who on the whole know absolutely nothing about the Funeral and Cremation Industry. Those actively involved all of course employ ‘Analyst people’ with an interest in economics, figures whatever who regularly run a line over Dignity’s figures, i.e. expensively employed ‘bean-counters’. Those Dignity figures will tell them one thing only, exactly how Dignity are performing. What this doesn’t do of course is to give any idea of what the remainder of the Industry are up to. Said Analysts etc should spend an equal amount of time in looking at this excellent blog since without it, how can any comparisons be drawn……………….?
Consistently Dignity have taken a swipe at the Independent opposition by using the term “fragmented” without ever explaining the use of that term. Put simply, following results last year and earlier this year (together with the Share Price tanking) Dignity realised that they had to do something and as ever that involves a mandate in favour of an expensive Management Consultancy outfit, since that’s the sort of mandate that the Square Mile expects, Corporate Governance you know and again adding to the costs of a Funeral…………………….
Let’s have a look at their Crematoria as it’s not just the pure Funeral side of the business that I suggest is alos suffering, it will not be long (if not already) that they start to feel a real pinch in this area. For many years no new Crematoriums were built but over the past 10 + years, thanks to Westerleigh and Memoria that position has significantly changed. Take the fairly new Cromer Crem as an example, this has a forecast 1000 funerals pa. Previously the nearest Crem or should I say Crem’s were both in Norwich, both owned by Dignity. We all know that the standard Dignity Crem fee is approx £999 so that’s an almost certain annual loss in turnover of £1M from those two locations alone. Memoria also have another operation (Waveney Memorial Park) south east of Norwich which must have added to the ‘Cromer loss’. All in all Dignity must be taking a large hit in Norfolk, considerably in excess of the £1M already mentioned
Their Oxford operation I suggest is literally haemorrhaging. A few years ago Memoria opened a new site near Abingdon, all of those funerals would previously have taken place at Oxford. This operation, the South Oxon Crem (shows as per their diary,) 21 funerals during the coming week, admittedly an exceptional amount and 11 next week. Assuming 800 funerals pa, that’s another £800K that’s not rolling into Dignity’s coffers. Meanwhile down in East Devon, the now mature Southern Co-op funded East Devon Crem has taken a considerable amount of funerals away from what was a very busy Dignity operation in Exeter. That site alone has probably taken 500 funeral pa from Dignity. Basingstoke is another. The recently opened Test Valley Crem near Romsey has almost certainly affected Basingstoke, say 450 pa (and possibly more)
I’ve highlighted five Dignity Crem’s, which have almost certainly in total shown a Revenue downturn pa of at least £3M, probably more. Memoria and Weterleigh Crem’s are all cheaper than Dignity, so it’s not just the Dignity Funeral side that’s having a marked effect on ‘Funeral Poverty’, it’s their Crem’s too. I suggest that said Analysts may care to take this into account as well since the number of new Crem’s being built will almost certainly not decrease. Dignity have a monopoly/near monopoly with their Crem’s located in the Brighton, Chichester, Crawley and Leatherhead areas, all very busy but are at risk to new ‘operations’
I ‘sped read’ through the recent media hype that they’ve issued, gawd how much did that cost……….. There’s something about under-performing Branches and something else about separating the Branches from the Mortuary/Vehicle bases, Funny that, since I thought that that had always been their business model. And on under-performing Branches this is a ‘token offering’ to the Square Mile, those that current “u-p” are exactly the same as those that did, say five years ago, their under-performance has been mollified by consistently large price increases across the board. I know who some of them are and would be really surprised if there are more than 30% of the entire Dignity Branches who are significantly profitable. The plain truth is that what’s happened to Dignity during the past twelve or so months had been a long time coming, a very long time and the Management have surely been fairly arrogant during this time, in that “…..it cannot happen to us….”. Prices have consistently been ramped up to a level which cannot be justified and for whatever reason they just hadn’t accepted the power of the web and the constant on-line flow of information re prices etc from opponents, that’s pure arrogance in itself. Going back to “Corporate Governance”, the current main Board have seven members, there’s only one who has long term experience of the Industry, I suggest that they’re no more connected to the Industry than your average daily commuter
Where is the business going…………….? Can it go any further – closing a few Branches here and there makes no difference, surely they cannot increase the Crem fees again…….? It’s a massive business with much middle management. I could go on I really could……
There’s an additional dimension which never seems to be mentioned regarding the level of a Dignity funeral and the knock on effects that this has towards “funeral poverty”. Put simply, with Dignity feeling that they can keep their prices at X and X for the different aspects of a Funeral and if the ‘market’ continues to accept them, then it’s pure logic that other Corporates (who are also based in or around Dignity Branches) feel that they can also charge those amounts. On this blog, Co-operative Funeralcare have made a number of appearances, the third largest Corporate i.e. Funeral Partners have to date made just the five appearances on here. FP have grown significantly during the five or so years and seem to be in very much an ‘avaricious expansion mode’ with 160 shops (or thereabouts) to be precise. Clearly no ‘mom and pop business’. FP are no different than Dignity or F’care when it comes to on-line pricing, in fact they appear to be the most secretive. Later this week I’ll be posting on here current prices for both Dignity and FP for Funerals in the same location. Two highlights (sic) will be the cost of a local removal and for supplying a hearse. I’ll also throw into the mix, comparable prices from a mature local Independent
Finally I had intended to write something along these lines six or so months ago but as the ‘Dignity Plc issue’ per se has again appeared on here, felt that this was a good a time as any to go into print
Andre
When did Dignity start putting prices on their websites – it’s an amazing development. That said, in the absence of a fully price list, the cynic in me sees “Full Service Funeral, from £3,395” as a strong hint that arrangers will continue to be under pressure to upsell.
Hi Tony
Here’s a link
https://www.dignityfunerals.co.uk/funeral-directors/locations/england/wiltshire/swindon/queens-drive
Andrew