It’s Sunday morning and I’ve just read the Minneapolis Tribune and, as I always do, perused the obituary section to not only see the obituaries but also to look at the death care related ads in it.  Last evening I was looking to book airfare for a winter trip for my wife and I – we are finally “Empty Nesters” – and I was struck by some of the sales and pricing tactics of the airlines.  I just happened to think – maybe we could learn something from them.

So, in my career in funeral service, I grew a somewhat small firm into a larger firm.  It was a rural area with a limited number of calls, but enough calls so that they were very much varied by what the consumer client wanted.  And, in about 1990 we were about 90% earth burial and 10% cremation.  CANA statistics and trends tell us that we will probably be upside down on that number by 2030 – 10% earth burial and 90% cremation.

We originally had one professional price for cremation services, much like we did for funeral professional services,  and if families wanted more it was an add on.  Our thinking was, “Well cremation is cremation”.  I was pretty wrong with that thinking.  Today, I firmly believe in package pricing and we have cremation packages for Direct Cremation, Direct Cremation with a Memorial Service, Cremation following a casketed service and so on.

I now know that people who want cremation now want it for a variety of reasons.  If you are in a metropolitan area of 4 million people like Minneapolis, most cremation providers advertise, as is seen in today’s Minneapolis Tribune, absolute low-cost direct cremation to “pull” that low-cost client.  Good for them – they have the numbers to be profitable with their quantity of services in the metropolitan community.

But what about if you operate a 150 call funeral home that has to be all things to all people in your community?  You cannot pull a profit with those kinds of low-cost prices.  That 150 call funeral home is where I was at as cremation really started to take off.

• The first thing that I had to understand as I raised the average ticket of a cremation service is that not all people want cremation simply for the low price.
• A second thing I learned is that very few people want cremation after a full-service funeral and if you pushed too hard that way you alienated many families who simply thought – even if you think strongly that a “body present” service  is better grief relief for the family – that you were trying to “up-sell” them.
• Finally, I learned – especially if you are 75 or more miles from that population center that offers low-cost Direct Cremations – that the client families from your community “want” to use their local funeral home as a provider and will pay a premium for that opportunity if it is within reason.

Tomorrow I’ll follow up on this line of thinking and correlate some of the ways that I believe small and not so small, rural funeral homes should be pricing cremation and compare it to what is happening in the airline industry.

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