According to a recent study by New York University, the funeral industry, or at least something along those lines, was invented by Neanderthals 50,000 years ago.
And while undertaking has been a part of every society ever since, today’s funeral home owner or director might need to employ the very latest trends in marketing in order to expand their business.
What Doesn’t Work
More prosaic efforts to gain market share have not worked very well, and some have even tarnished the industry. Pre-need contracts top that list, and while you and other honorable business people may have entered into some with your neighbors, unscrupulous con artists undermined you on a massive scale.
In 2006 AARP published a scathing critique of them, mentioning Forrest Hill by name, and should anyone turn to the powerful association for advice today, that article is still a top search result on their site.
But even after such warnings, a few years ago a “company” called National Prearranged Services sent evocatively dressed saleswomen to funeral homes across several states peddling pre-need financing packages that were supposedly backed by a conservative, long-term investment fund. When it turned out to be a Ponzi scheme, several of its principals were imprisoned.
Roused into action by this and other scams, the federal government saw fit to upgrade its Funeral Rule Act again just last year.
And to insure compliance, the Federal Trade Commission sends undercover agents to funeral homes. Unfortunately, so far these visits have found widespread non-compliance – and CrossCheck’s home state, California, has the worst record of all, with two-thirds failing the test. Other states had failure rates as high as one half, with the overall implication that enforcement will continue to ratchet up.
So if you're a funeral director and you sometimes feel like you’re in the cross hairs, it’s not because you’re paranoid.
What Might…
If scams attract government supervision, the feminization of your industry may be the most important counter-trend. Women first outnumbered men enrolled in U.S. funeral schools back in 2000, and the gap has continued to widen ever since.
Women undertakers believe that grieving families find it easier to relate to a female, even while some clergy go so far as to refuse to work with them, and whether or not that’s true the feminization trend continues unabated.
Some women funeral home owners and directors feel that their presence in the community as mothers helps put people at ease. Mary Gibbons in Chicago, for example, talked about how even casual references to her children can relax customers in their time of need:
It may be useful to note that the Funeral Rule most often broken has to do with your price list. As you know, you’re supposed to provide a complete list so your customer can figure out what they want and what they can afford. Putting yourself in a position to help them arrange payments may be a good idea, especially in the absence of a pre-need contract, but the most important take-away may have more to do with transparency than budgeting.
According to Forbes, transparency has become one of the most important marketing tools in today’s world. Since consumers have become accustomed to learning practically everything they need to know by spending a few minutes on the Internet, gaps in a funeral home’s presentation can raise suspicions.
On the other hand, effusive transparency can distinguish you from the competition. As Gibbons mentions, the fact that she’s a regular local mom strips away the pretense that there’s something different about her just because she runs a funeral home. There’s no mystery surrounding her or her business, which she believes comforts people and makes it easier for them to trust her.
That’s transparency, and any funeral home director might take these lessons to heart and find ways to be more transparent to their community.
Acknowledging that most people prefer not to dwell on death, typical local business engagements like sponsoring sports teams might hit the wrong note. But not to worry – because even here in California, one of the Union’s youngest states, volunteer preservationists care for historic cemeteries as a way to raise awareness of local history. And that may be the perfect place for you to engage – or even to take a leadership role.
For example, in Santa Rosa, a town just a few miles north of our headquarters, there’s a cemetery that’s been in use since the town was first settled. Volunteers groom it, which the legions of citizens who walk there appreciate, but it’s the volunteer theater that really gets the community involved.
Every Halloween they stage up to a dozen plays at grave sites, depicting the lives of the deceased complete with period costumes and props. It sells out hundreds of tickets, in advance, year after year. Another theatrical tour focuses on people who were either murdered or who murdered someone. Grizzly, true, but fascinating enough to sell out just as consistently.
On the tamer side, the preservationists have gone to great lengths to propagate native plants, especially wild roses, and they hold equally well-attended weekend tours for the horticulturally obsessed.
Something along those lines may help you make your business more transparent. You might look at your price list itself as another tool for transparency. Rather than just list all of your products and services, you might also offer a payment option that doesn’t require financing or a credit check but that lets your customer pay less than full price up front. We can help you with that – click the image below to learn how.
And finally, it may help you present a warm, transparently endearing face to your public if you keep your industry’s 50,000 year history in mind. The archeologists studying that Neanderthal grave discovered that the deceased was very old, toothless, and unable to move without assistance. He was well cared for before he was interred, proving that love has been at the core of your profession since the start.
