Audacity Recording - Marketing & Merchandising

Two students discuss marketing techniques in the funeral service industry. They cover topics such as effective location, demographics, and the importance of knowing who you are marketing to. They also mention the impact of bad marketing and mistrust in the industry. They provide examples of successful and unsuccessful marketing strategies and emphasize the need for sensitivity and cultural understanding in funeral service marketing. Hello, my name is Lily McLaughlin. And I'm Eliana Branch. Welcome to our podcast unit. We are students in Funeral Service Marketing and Merchandising, a class taught at the University of Minnesota's Mortuary Science Program. As you may know today, we will be having a conversation about marketing and funeral service. More specifically, we will be discussing the effective marketing techniques and the subtopics that are important, such as location, demographics, and how technology is involved in all of this. In discussing effective marketing techniques, we will also talk a little bit about failed marketing techniques, which will hopefully help emphasize the positive forms of marketing in funeral service. Jumping right in, we are going to start with location. What does effective location in marketing look like? What do ineffective locations in marketing look like? How do we choose where to market? Oftentimes, we see funeral service marketing in churches, nursing homes, ad placements, and mailings and emails. These are all things to think about. Where to market depends heavily on who a funeral home is marketing to. Many homes rely on at-need funeral services. Funeral service planning once a loved one has already passed, which is why they choose to advertise in places like nursing homes. However, in recent years, funeral homes have expanded to the pre-need arrangement market. Therefore, expanding where they advertise, many homes host community events to introduce the idea to the community. Morris Nelson, a funeral home in Richfield, Minnesota, hosts a trunk-or-tree event every year for Halloween consisting of vendors, food trucks, community volunteers, and even a feel-the-hurst toy donation drive. This event has been widely successful in involving the community in their space without being forward about the topic of death. Like we stated before, who you want to market to plays a huge role in the form of marketing you would choose. We truly want to emphasize the importance of knowing who you are marketing to. Knowing who you are marketing to plays a key role in knowing the methods in which you should use to market. A pamphlet would do little to no good to someone who checks their mailbox every other month, while online advertisements would be ineffective to the older generation who does not frequently use computers. There are so many different segments of customers to advertise, ranging from great expectations to free spirits. They all have very different wants, leading to strong opinions and reactions to marketing. One of the forms of marketing that seems to reach everyone is word of mouth and bad marketing. Though unintentional, this industry runs high with emotions. So when CNN releases an article titled, Government Warns Funeral Home to Stop Misleading Bereaved Customers About Pricing, it leads to a lot of talk and mistrust of funeral homes and funeral directors, thrusting us into the light and under much more scrutiny. Yeah, that CNN article is just one of many that was released when the FTC used secret shoppers to expose multiple funeral homes in the U.S. for not presenting a general price list at the right time or not even at all. This is something that is very serious in our industry and comes across like intentional price discrepancy. There have also been several cases in the recent years, specifically out of Colorado, that have created a large amount of bad press for funeral homes, and even more so on green or natural funeral homes. Last year, the owners of Return to Nature Funeral Home in Colorado, one that advertised being natural and green, were accused of improperly storing over 150 bodies, resulting in the loss of integrity for funeral homes across the state and country. This is a news story that blew up nationwide and is a great example of how bad press spreads. When thinking about demographics, a funeral home would want to research the neighborhood they are in and the surrounding communities. This will help the funeral home know who to market to and how to market. For example, if a funeral home is located in a community that is a majority of a certain culture, you want your directors to be knowledgeable on that culture's funeral rites and customs. It is also important to be sensitive to the mistrust that Lily has mentioned before. That mistrust in funeral homes does actually come from a lot of truth for people and how funeral home markets themselves can rebuild that trust. A perfect example of effective demographic marketing is the Green Burial Council's statement on racial equity. They state on their website, The underlying cultural and racial constructs that inform the way we care for our dead are nowhere more obvious than in funeral service throughout our history. To understand where green burial fits into cultural norms and expectations around after-death traditions, we need first to understand that history and how it impacts choice, or the lack of it, today. We hope you all learned a little from us today. This is a very broad conversation and these topics can be discussed much deeper, of course, but thank you for taking the time to listen. Thanks for listening. Bye everyone! Bye!