Business
When you look to the past of funeral home marketing it is pretty accurate to say that many funeral homes “Got their names out there” and then waited for deaths to happen. When I started in the business, our industry was as far from “Pre-Emptive” marketing as any industry. . . it’s just the way…
In the 50th Anniversary year of the 1972 Rapid City Flood, funeral director Ozzie Osheim will be awarded, on October 21, the Monsignor O’Connell Founders Award of the Catholic Social Services for his humanitarian role helping to care for the 238 who died in the then community of 40,000 people. The Rapid City Flood, according…
If you follow Funeral Director Daily with any regularity you will know that I returned from the 2022 National Funeral Directors Association (NFDA) International Convention last week. This article, titled Back from Baltimore, published last week gave my general impressions on attending my first national convention in over a decade. In today’s article I’m going…
This article from Fast Company introduces us to a new start-up in the burial and memorialization space, Transcend. Transcend, the brainchild of founder and CEO Matthew Kochmann, plans to be somewhat like Better Place Forests in that they will be bringing forests and trees into the realm of memorialization. Unlike Better Place Forests, where a…
There is no doubt that the establishment of the company Pure Cremation (company website here) and its business of what they call “no-fuss” direct cremation is making an impact on the death care business in Great Britain. Launched in 2015 as a low-cost provider of cremation services, the company is changing how some death care…
It’s been a long time since I’ve attended a National Funeral Directors Association national convention. But, tomorrow I’m heading off to Baltimore, Maryland, for the 2022 edition of the NFDA convention. I did not attend the NFDA Annual Convention during my funeral directing years very often. I’ve always enjoyed the ones that I’ve went to…
It’s not surprising to see why in a world of 73 million baby boomers and a large group of funeral home owners planning to retire in the next five years that private equity businesses see an opportunity in Death Care, specifically in owning funeral homes. This article from Fortune entitled “Death is anything but a…
As long as I’ve written this blog I’ve predicted that death care – that is dispositions for the dead human body – will eventually become increasingly a collection of “niche” businesses. That is, compared to what we have gotten used to seeing. . .a funeral home that takes care of your every need in the…
The Tuesday article of Funeral Director Daily entitled “We Live in a Different World” and dealing with the idea that much of death care, including how we acquire and retain our customers through marketing had barely published when I saw a presentation about some “old school” ideas that are trending back in the hopes of…
Recently Apple was named the sponsor of this year’s Super Bowl halftime show. They will be replacing Pepsi, who has been the sponsor for several years. It occurred to me, and it was not surprising, that this is the business of new “information technology” replacing the old standardized American “product innovation, manufacturing, distribution” business of…
