December 2000
The Director - Features
Deathcare 2000
Independent funeral homes are well positioned to turn current trends to their competitive advantage, but will they?
During the 1980s and 1990s, some independent funeral home owners feared that acquisition companies would gobble up the market and drive them out of business before the year 2000. Their predictions didn't become true as the majority of funeral homes still remain independently owned. How they react to current trends, however, could determine the brightness of their future.
Deathcare 2000 discusses several trends that are presently impacting the funeral service profession, including the present condition of the consolidation companies, and the declining death rate. It focuses on the changing attitudes and segmentation of consumers and explains the paralleling trends between funeral service and mainline religious denominations. It explains how the vocabulary in funeral service is being replaced with new semantics. It predicts how the Internet will change the dynamics of the arrangement conference and offers some suggestions that forward-thinking funeral directors can implement in order to adapt to the changing nature of funeral service.
The article was written by Alan Creedy, president of Trust 100, an independent preneed marketer that operates in the United States and Canada.
