This morning’s article related to the changing face of religion and how that has affected the funeral/memorial/tribute portion of the death care business over the past couple of decades.  Over the weekend I noticed a couple of items that signaled current trends and put out the question as to whether or not these emerging trends will affect death care consumer’s choices moving forward.

 

The first trend is from a short note in Seeking Alpha and mentions that more Americans are living paycheck to paycheck at this time and it just isn’t the low-income that have that issue. The article states that more and more $100,000 earning families are in this situation.

 

Here’s what Seeking Alpha said:  “While January’s non-farm payrolls report was a blowout, with the unemployment rate hitting the lowest mark since 1969, the majority of Americans have seen their budgets squeezed last year. In fact, at the end of 2022, some 64% of U.S. consumers were living paycheck-to-paycheck, up from 61% in the year-ago period, according to a recent study by LendingClub and Pymnts.com. That means 9.3M more Americans are living paycheck-to-paycheck, and what’s even more alarming is that 86% of them earned more than $100K annually, underscoring the heightened scale of the surge in the cost of living.”

 

The 2nd trend I saw proclaimed this weekend I found rather interesting.  While we have known of “Influencers” on social media for sometime, it appears that a growing trend is that of “de-influencers”.  While “influencers”, who tend to be satisfied clients or paid spokespeople, go on social media to tell why potential customers should use your products or services, “de-influencers” are just the opposite.  They will go on social media to tell others why not to use your products or services.

 

There is actually little known about it at this time, but this recent link from TikTok notes its growing popularity.

 

Funeral Director Daily take:  There is no doubt that “finances” and “image of product” are two items that drive consumer selection when choosing to buy a product or services.  For those of you that own businesses, these are just two more pieces of data or information to put in your tool box when evaluating the promotion of you product or services.

 

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