How full-service and niche undertaker websites use words
Posted by Richard Rawlinson While many undertakers’ websites offer useful information for those planning funerals, they’re understandably not impartial, being the marketing platforms of commercial companies. Compare and contrast, for example, these words from both mainstream undertakers and specialists in their given niche (simple funerals, woodland burials etc). A full-service, family-run chain says this of direct […]
Undertaker’s windows: the Individual Funeral Company
The Individual Funeral Company is a young business in Oxford run by Lucy Jane. At one time she rode motorbike hearses for Paul Sinclair. Lucy recently took on a new member of staff, ‘paw-bearer’ Joplin. Joplin is a French bulldog and has made a great hit with passers-by, many of who have hurtled through the […]
Undertakers’ windows: Heaven On Earth
Believe it or not, this beautiful undertaker’s window is full of the iconography of death. Heaven on Earth is in the city of Bristol and is run by Paula Rainey-Crofts and Simon Durgan. It is one of the pioneer ‘alternative’ undertakers. (There has to be a better term than ‘alternative’, what is it?) Urbi et orbi = […]
Window dressing
An email arrived here recently from a person who has been struck by the way undertakers dress their windows. ‘Dreadful’ is one of the adjectives she used, ‘depressing’ another. She’d like to set up a small business and put them right. Whether or not undertakers’ windows are on the whole dressed badly is a matter […]
Happy birthday to you!
Trawling through a stack of local papers of a weary Friday afternoon, the GFG’s gannet-eyed media monitoring team came across some advertorial in the Ipswich Star which gladdened their eyes. It was half a page of advertorial celebrating the first birthday of GM Taylor, Independent Funeral Director. They very much liked its directness and transparency. […]
Remembrance Day #3
The window of the Individual Funeral Company, Oxford. Proprietor Lucy Jane tells us: ‘Almost everything in the window was donated by my cousins Lewis & Chay Coulbert and was used by them in Afghanistan. They also gave me lots of pictures. The large one in the front of the window is Lewis while he was […]
Undertakers on parade
Undertakers aren’t noted for versatility when it comes to window-dressing, and they’re not to be blamed for this. If you’re in the death business there’re all sorts of things you simply can’t put on display. Not that this in any way excuses an assortment of dusty headstones and urns dotted by dead flies and […]
Death in the community
East Midlands funeral director, A. W. Lymn The Family Funeral Service, has become the first funeral directors in England to advertise on a billboard. The poster is the first of a series of 9 which will appear over the course of the next year The billboard is situated at the bottom of Greenhill Rise in […]
The word ‘progressive’ is overused and overrated
Posted by Richard Rawlinson A follow-up to Charles Cowling’s thirst-quenching piece about the need for independent undertakers to blow their trumpets louder to steal market share from the corporate chains, here. It’s my hunch that some indies should stop perceiving themselves as niche, fringe and progressive, and instead project themselves as mainstream. Why? There’s an abundance […]
No place like home
Now that most funeral directors have a website it’s a good time to review the way they receive visitors on their home page. It’s a darn difficult one to get right and no mistaking. After all, no one wants to buy a funeral. So how do you allay fears, define and differentiate yourself, inspire warmth […]
