Funeral Service

Identifying who the customers are for funeral services is complicated. Marketing a funeral service with traditional advertising methods is serious challenge. We are in a business of offering a service that the vast majority of people would rather not think about. Relatively few people pre-plan their funerals while they are alive, leaving most of the decisions to surviving family members. Family members will have to undergo emotional strain and decision-making pressure on of arranging a funeral within a few days of losing a love one.

In many cases, funeral businesses are passed down through generations of families. As we are starting from scratch, we will face competition against well-established business owners. To successfully market our pre-planning service, non-traditional advertising is our best choice. According to Google, 81.3% of all funeral planning begin online. These people searching online have an immediate need for our services and are online to research and decide whom they are going to call and ultimately purchase from.

We have segmented the market in terms of four generations that are over age 30 who form the active decision-making market. The four generations are the GI Generation (born from 1901 - 1924), the silent generation (born from 1925 - 1945), the baby Boomers (born from 1946 - 1964) and the portion of Generation X (born 1965 - early 1980s) that is over 30.

Targeting at the Baby Boomers with unique offering will not only attract Baby Boomers for their own funerals and those that they choose for their parents, it will also attract a significant percentage of the silent generation that has shown propensity to spend money on themselves. A nation survey showed 72% out of 900 respondents favor pre-planning their own funeral, 35% indicated that they had already made some prearrangement; while the 52% indicated they are likely to do so (Phill, 2005).

As a result, one of the most important reasons for pre-planning is to make the process which close friends and family members can come to grips with the death, rather than having to run around for a few days and make arrangement in haste.