Context
This De Gusipe funeral home commercial stages a family talking about their loved one’s funeral, that they have just attended. While one of the characters compliments the funeral planning stating it showed “how much we cared”, another character objects that the deceased had actually planned his own funeral, which showed “how much he cared”. Finally, the commercial ends on De Gusipe’s slogan: “because we care”. This slogan about sums up the findings reported by Whitley, Garcia‐Rada, Bardhi, Ariely and Morewedge in an article published in the Journal of Consumer Psychology in 2021. This paper shows that caring for loved ones is at the heart of funeral spending motives and practices, whether the funeral is planned for oneself or for a loved one.
Research questions
In this article, the authors choose to study funeral planning as a form of relational spending that only occurs at the end of life. Relational spending consists in making purchases of goods and services for loved ones. Contrary to other forms of relational spending, funeral spending is unplanned and highly emotional, a finite event and does not materially benefit the recipient. Funeral planners are not motivated by reciprocity as they could be in other forms of gift giving. As a form of relational spending, funeral planning should be motivated by caring for others: for instance, when preparing someone else’s funeral, planners spend to honor the deceased’s memory, while when preparing for one’s own funeral, the aim is to alleviate the emotional and financial burdens of close ones. Therefore, Whitley, Garcia‐Rada, Bardhi, Ariely and Morewedge ask the following research question: how does caring for others influences motives and practices of funeral spending?
Method
To answer this research question, the authors opted for a mixed method and conducted 3 studies:
– Study 1 consists of exploratory qualitative interviews to understand the motives of funeral planners, whether they plan their own funeral (self-planned) or the funeral of a loved one (other-planned). 15 people who had planned a funeral until March 2020 (before Covid) were interviewed and received a 25$ gift card to partake in the study.
– Study 2 analyzes the differences in spending amounts between self-planned funerals and other-planned funerals thanks to archival contract data provided by a US funeral home. 128 self-planned contracts, 128 other-planned contracts that matched the self-planned contracts in terms of recipient age, gender, year of funeral planning, and 129 randomly sampled self-planned contracts were considered.
– Study 3 consists of 3 sub-studies that aim at replicating the results of study 2 across different funeral contexts (burial or cremation) and considering 3 sources of money for the funeral spending amount (the planner’s money, another family member’s money, money from an insurance policy).
Results
– When planning a funeral for others or for themselves, people are motivated by a sense of responsibility for the enhancement of the well-being of others. Funeral planning is about caring both for the deceased and the surviving community. Funerals should maintain the network of familial and social relationships surrounding the deceased: planners strive to maintain these connections.
– In the case of other-planned funerals, planners try to prepare a funeral that would make the deceased proud. They endeavor to preserve the legacy and honor the memory of their loved one, by creating a positive image of the deceased.
– In the case of self-planned funerals, planners wish to alleviate the financial and cognitive burden for loved ones and bring their community together.
– Whether funerals are self-planned or other planned, planners make decisions by balancing the preferences of the interested parties, making personal sacrifices and spending money.
– Funerals are not only about the deceased but are also about the planner and the rest of the deceased’s community and family. Sometimes, the interested parties do not see eye to eye about the funeral planning. Therefore, the planner should balance the preferences of all parties. Sometimes, this means that the planner forgoes his/her personal preferences to honor the deceased, engages in conflict with other family members challenging the deceased’s will or accommodates the community’s needs by forgoing some of the deceased’s demands. In the case of self-planned funerals, balancing preferences can translate into balancing personal preferences against religious customs and standards.
– Funerals are about making personal sacrifices. In the case of other-planned funerals, planners make sacrifices in terms of time, effort, emotional work and from a financial point of view (by leaving work to plan the funeral, for instance). In the case of self-planned funerals, planners wish to relieve their loved ones of the decision-making process, which frees the bereaved from anticipated personal sacrifice and avoids conflicts planners may encounter when balancing the preferences of all interested parties.
– Funerals imply spending money. In the case of other-planned funerals, planners wish to spend an appropriate amount that will honor the deceased, which translates into choosing middle or high-priced options. Even though planners are usually unprepared for the wide product and service choices provided by funeral homes, choosing the cheapest options is perceived as immoral and inappropriate. On the opposite, when funerals are self-planned, planners wish to spend less, so as to leave more money for the surviving family. This translates into a preference for a minimalistic ceremony, usually involving cremation which is less ceremonial and does not tie the deceased’s family with the burial location.
– People are willing to spend more (1000 $ on average) on their loved one’s funeral than on their own. Control variables such as service type, purchase of a funeral package, funeral home price increases, age and gender of the funeral recipient, and the type of funeral (cremation or burial) do not interfere with the result. Moreover, this result does not vary whether the money comes from the planner, another family member, or an insurance policy.
Why is this article relevant for researchers?
Funerals are an understudied field in marketing, partly because they are taboo in Western cultures that associate death with stress and grief. They are usually studied from a sociological point of view and considered as rituals. This article proposes to view funerals in a totally different light: funeral planning has become complex because of the mass marketization of the ritual, and the stakes of funeral planning are numerous (financial, familial, social etc.), which is why considering funerals as a form of relational spending rather than a ritual can help better understand the planners’ motives and practices.
Therefore, this article contributes both to the literature on funeral spending and on relational spending. By showing the complexity of funeral planning, this article suggests that all kinds of relational spending, or consumption choices involving relations and caring for others, should be studied with a more holistic approach. For instance, further investigations about funerals as a collective event could include the question of status, image, projected self, signaling, on the planner’s decisions.
The authors also advise to study spending as a way to cope with one’s grief, and to consider other drivers of spent amount, such as uncertainty about the deceased’s preferences, religious beliefs, emotional distress… Finally, Study 1 revealed that there are many different types of personal sacrifices besides financial sacrifices that could be studied in future papers.
Why is this article relevant for professionals?
This research is highly relevant for funeral homes: it helps them better understand consumer motives and practices. According to these findings, a good way to keep bereaved customers satisfied is to support them throughout the process of funeral planning and help them fulfil their missions of balancing the preferences of all interested parties, honoring the deceased’s memory, creating bonds with the deceased’s family and community. In this respect, this Milner and Orr ad shows that this funeral home perfectly understands the planners’ need to have “someone by their side” and the planners’ motive to honor the deceased’s memory (thanks to their slogan “honoring lives”). The results also question Bailey’s funeral home’s positioning: since spending money on middle or high quality products is one of the common ways to honor a loved one, is it relevant to advertise “Still the Perfect Tribute any family can afford”?
Moreover, this article proves that self-planned services may not always be profitable because planners tend to spend less on their own funerals. This sheds new light on the pre-need plans set up by numerous funeral homes. Moreover, since planners are often warned against pre-need plans because they constitute a financial risk for them or their survivors, funeral homes may not necessarily benefit from providing planners with this option any more.