Marketing

Bunch of boobies?

29 November 2012
Charles
2 Comments
Categories: Marketing

“These pink blazers show the insidious creep of cause marketing. Chicken buckets, perfume and now your friendly neighborhood funeral director. It will literally follow us to the grave. How soon before we are offered pink granite headstones with a tasteful (and licensed) ribbon symbol replacing the dash between the dates of our births and deaths?

“The idea of creating breast cancer awareness at a funeral seems idiotic. I don’t see how you could POSSIBLY be more aware of anything else while attending the services of someone who died from metastatic breast cancer. For me, it would truly be the final insult.”

Source: Katherine O’Brien at ihatebreastcancer

Quote of the Day

12 November 2012
Charles
No comments
Categories: funeral cost, funeral directors, Marketing

“InvoCare has has seen little customer leakage.”

Invocare is the major consolidated player in the Australian funeral industry, which bears close comparison in may respects with the UK funeral industry though it also has a strong US flavour. 

Invocare ceo Andrew Smith says: “Most families don’t pick a funeral director based on price. Most will pick based on service.” In marketing terms this prompts the question: How do you transmit that message through your marketing materials?  Cutting prices is the easy way to go, you can get that across easily enough. But how do you communicate the quality of your service offer? 

Read more about Invocare here. 

The view below the radar

26 July 2012
Charles
2 Comments
Categories: Co-operative Funeralcare, Dignity, funeral cost, funeral directors, funeral trends, Marketing, pre-need plans

An article in the Times dated 15 July, based on an interview with Mike McCollum, ceo of Dignity plc, offers one or two (no more) features of interest.

His definition of an undertaker?

“We’re event organisers,” says McCollum. “We arrange a family event for you on very short notice, which you wish you didn’t have to arrange.”

He adds:

“And, on the day of the funeral, we’re the master of ceremonies. The funeral director makes sure everything goes exactly to plan, to the second, and hopefully makes sure everybody, in an unfamiliar situation, knows where to sit and where to go.”

He doesn’t say if he regards this model as eternal, nor whether he is aware of trends towards empowered mourners who take a different view of the brief of a funeral event planner.

Concerning the travails of his reassuringly inept rivals, ‘Co-operative’ Funeralcare, he is defensive of the hub model and reckons “it’s time people accepted some home truths”.

“The definition of a mortuary is a place where dead people are kept. When people die and they can be in different conditions. You need specialist refrigeration, specialist conditions. You’d expect them to be clinical, to use stainless steel equipment, to be easy to clean. They’re not necessarily going to be nice places to be.”

Hmn.

By way of assuring Times readers who are also Dignity shareholders, the article points out that Dignity’s market capitalisation has risen from £180m to £446m and the share price from 230p to 810p. The writer does not detect the present injurious effect of underfunded funeral plans. Nor does he point out Dignity’s Achilles heel, its high prices, vulnerable, in an increasingly price-conscious market, to consumer scrutiny. Nor does he question Dignity’s policy of brand omerta, a remarkable stance for an outfit in the event-planning business.

Would you buy shares in Dignity?

Source (paywalled)

Is this the industry’s High Noon moment?

26 January 2012
Charles
13 Comments
Categories: funeral directors, Marketing, scandals

The funeral industry is in a bad place. Public reaction to last week’s Which? report revealed few friends. It also showed it to be no good at defending itself.

Things are going to get worse. Time is running out. 

At the GFG we’ve lost count of the number of calls we’ve taken in the last year from TV production companies, in particular, wanting, with one honourable exception, to dig dirt and put the boot in. The bully boys are circling. 

Crisis? Yes, crisis.

Consumers are baffled and angry because there’s no way of knowing who’s good (if any) and who’s not. Poor marketing is a contributory cause. But the most brutal truth of the matter is that the codes of conduct of the industry trade bodies, NAFD and SAIF, simply do not, by themselves, offer consumers quality assurance.

So what’s a good undertaker to do? From time to time, here at the GFG, we like to offer suggestions.

First, the good guys need to hang together and keep the bad eggs out. They can do that in one of two ways. They can form yet another trade body, a selective one. Or they can adopt a different business model.

In the past we’ve looked at the viability of rolling out a really good, proud brand – ‘John Lewis’ funerals. That’s the way for the consolidators to go. Presently, the consolidators are adding zero value to consumers’ experience of a funeral, and short-term value only for their shareholders. Their present way of operating is astoundingly dim.

We’ve also looked at the joint venture model used by Specsavers – here. 

Another model that funeral directors might like to consider is the Best Western model.

It’s a clever and an attractive way of doing things – a collaborative way of doing things. Best Western is an organisation which provides back office roles, marketing, reservations and operational support, to over 4,000 hotels in 80 countries worldwide. Best Western doesn’t own any of these hotels; each one is independent. It’s a chain, but it’s not a chain. You get the best of both worlds: all the warmth and individuality of an independent hotel, and all the assurance of quality standards which all hotels have to meet.

It’s not an orthodox franchise operation where both franchisor and franchisee operate for profit. Best Western is a non-profit membership operation which works, democratically, as near as dammit as a co-op, one member, one vote. Membership is renewed annually.

Re-read the last two paragraphs substituting ‘funeral director’ for ‘hotel’ and you begin see how easily this model could adapt to the funeral industry.

Here at the GFG we do not feel a sense of responsibility to save the funeral industry. Our focus is the best interests of consumers. Good funeral directors collaborating effectively to keep each other up to the mark and get the message out would help a lot. 

It is high time they got their act together. 

Making over the undertakers

23 December 2011
Charles
5 Comments
Categories: funeral directors, Marketing

Following this post by Andrew Hickson of Kingfisher Independent Funeral Services in St Neots, we at the GFG sense we may spend some of 2012 talking about how funeral directors can improve public perception of themselves and differentiate themselves from their competitors by communicating the good news about themselves appropriately and effectively. Andrew himself is going to start the ball rolling. Well, he already has.

We can already foresee lots of lively discussion. The content and quality of marketing communications from most funeral directors  is abysmal. In an age when most of us gather information online, most undertakers’ websites (where they exist) are dismaying to look at, clumsily worded and littered with spelling and grammar mistakes. As marketing tools designed to inspire confidence, they do exactly the reverse. 

So here’s a tip for undertakers from the team at the GFG (there are lots more where this comes from). Have a look at the text on the home page of the Fitzgerald Funeral Home and Crematory of Illinois, USA. Read the first sentence: We are here to help you remember their story. Note that it takes them no more than five words before they get to the ‘you’ word. ‘You’ is the most important word in any promotional text. Great copywriting is about dialogue. How long does it take to get to the first ‘you’ in your text?

When the business offer matches consumers’ requirements, everyone wins. One of the highest priorities of consumers in this economy-gone-wrong is cost. Yet this is an industry in which financially inefficient micro-businesses not only abound, but are growing in number. Consolidation, rationalisation, economies of scale, all would bring down costs. And yet no group has yet succeeded in establishing an acceptable national brand identity. On the contrary. And it’s not just the egregious incompetence of the big players which is to blame.

There are complex reasons why consumers do not want to deal with a corporate provider. It’s an unlovable model which smacks of bigtime profiting from the misfortunes of others. But it needn’t necessarily be so. 

Take the Specsavers model, for example. Each Specsavers shop is owned and run by an optician under a joint venture partnership with Specsavers. Specsavers takes the view that opticians like being opticians and probably aren’t so good at or keen on some of the boring, nitty-gritty stuff that goes with being a business. So Specsavers offers more than 50 services, including advertising, insurance, accounting, tax planning, property services, information technology and retail training, the back office administration, branding and marketing, leaving the opticians free to get on and do what they do best: fixing people up with eyeglasses. The optician pockets the profits and pays a fee to Specsavers. We all get good, cheap specs. 

No one has tried the joint venture partnership model in Funeralworld. It would offer ceremony-makers a way to make a decent living at last. Why wouldn’t it work?

At the opposite end of the scale, we note that many rural villages have formed local co-operative societies to run their post office, shop and pub. Why not their undertaker, too? A community response to death and bereavement can only be a social blessing. The vision of the Rochdale Pioneers may have been distorted beyond recognition by The Co-operative Group’s vile Funeralcare arm, but it remains unsullied and vibrant. According to Co-operatives UK “There are 5,450 independent co-operative businesses in the UK, working in all parts of the economy. Together they have a combined turnover of over £33 billion and have outperformed the UK economy as a whole, growing by 21% since the start of the credit crunch in 2008.” [Source]

Stealing a march?

22 December 2011
Charles
17 Comments
Categories: Marketing

By Andrew Hickson, proprietor of Kingfisher Independent Funeral Services, St Neots. 

A couple of days ago, Charles asked me to write a blog post about marketing. I wanted to approach this from the point-of-view of a Funeral Director such as myself who has recently established a business, and is therefore dazzled, bemused and somewhat apprehensive of the minefield that is the marketing world. 

Barely a day goes by without some company or other telephoning, claiming they can increase traffic to my website, or wanting me to advertise in their new brochure, or even, as some do, guaranteeing that work will increase if they are contracted to do my marketing. Surprisingly, when they’re asked to put that in writing, they are not quite so forthcoming with their claims. 

I’m still putting an article together, and hope to publish this early in the New Year, but yesterday I was called to remove a gentleman whose GP had certified his death and had already completed the cremation paperwork and left this with him. 

The paperwork had the large stamp of another Funeral Director very clearly on the front page. Two chances of being called then, once by the GP, and once by the next-of-kin. But not a lot of scope for the client to make any informed decisions. 

Clever marketing, or just a wee bit cheeky?

You have 30 seconds – impress me

16 November 2011
Charles
1 Comment
Categories: Attitudes to death, death and funerals, Marketing

You’re the first internet based funeral service. You want to make sure people know you are different and you have 30 seconds of TV time to get your message across. How would you do it? Yesterday we presented the advertisement that Basic Funerals in Canada created. You can see it here.  We thought it was worth repeating because it highlights the whole question of how advertising works and what sort of message you might want to get across.

Basic Funerals CEO Eric Vandermeersch is clear that, as he launches his new service, he wants to differentiate it from traditional businesses. Cost of course (and it’s interessting that home visits are seen as exceptional), but it’s also about style and approach:

“When you talk about funerals, obviously it’s a sad time, but there’s also a great element of celebration. We’re not trying to make light of the serious side, what we’re really doing is showing people that we’ve changed the model—it doesn’t have to be expensive anymore,” he said. “There is a lighter side of the industry and we’re not afraid to show it because it is the most important side of the typical funeral.”

He added that commercials he’s seen for other funeral homes lack in the entertainment department. “Usually, it’s the owner of the funeral home standing by a fireplace talking about how his family has been in the industry for six generations and it’s pretty boring to say the least.”

You may not do a TV ad yet, but thinking of your website and paperbased advertising are you the man on the right or the lady on the left? And who has got it right?