Chapter 6. Industry professionals research.
The UK’s cities
The goal of this research is to understand the current value of digital technologies in funerals, tributes and remembrance.
In order to ‘draw a map’ for my following steps I outlined several segments for my research: funeral homes with a modern vision, for example, the Manchester Crematorium, the City of London Cemetery for its traditional and eco-friendly practices with trees and Garden of Rests, alternative practices like celebrants, a digital project about preplanning FinalFling.com, event projects like Death Cafe and Good Life Good Death Good Grief.
I visited London, Glasgow, Edinburgh, and Stratford-upon-Avon, and was lucky to speak to nine industry experts who represent such a challenging industry.
The research backed up personalization, cost-efficient and sustainable approaches as trends, a growing number of pre-planning and pre-payment services. Local memorial web-sites of funeral homes are more actively used by younger generation for paying tributes to loved ones. Celebration of life’s services encouraging a life story and a personality are getting more and more popular. Death as a topic is not such a taboo as it was decades ago and one of a clue is a talk — an opportunity to share a pain and fear in the right place, not to keep them inside.
Digital as a tool pushes the funeral industry forward, but it is mostly used when death happens or when people start to think of it by some important reasons.
Remembrance in this perspective is a bridge between physical death and virtual immortality, but a challenging one, because it appeals to the past — something that we can’t change, we only rely on our memory and time to record it. Digital can propose a responsive solution for loyal users — for those who want and have time to pay tribute and to be remembered. Besides memorial web-sites, social media is becoming a place for sharing a grief and condolence.
In one article there was a good point, why celebration of life usually becomes important when it is practically gone — it should be with us all our life. I took Celebration of life as a clue — a power of life story that we create every moment of our life as authors and that can live forever due to digital.
When my beloved Mom passed away 7 years ago and then my 16-years old dog 3 years ago I wanted to create an album with all pictures in one place, but blamed myself that all these years I couldn’t find time for it. I don’t know what happens in the future and wether I have an opportunity to pass my family story to the next generations even creating an album. Life is very unpredictable. I only know that a family tree and stories are important and, unfortunately, some of them are gradually forgotten. I want my Mom to live not only in my heart and memory. I want to keep her story in a respectful way. She was unique, smart, beautiful — a great wise person with big heart and hard life and despite everything she kept positive view of life and love of life. She is my friend, my teacher, my Mom.
Now I have several analogue albums, digital images and videos on social timelines, cloud storages’ accounts, memory cards, digital cam and my laptop. My smartphone became the only device for capturing moments and due to this device a number of these captured moments multiplies all the time. It is good, but what’s next. I still don’t have time to manage all the content I have. And I don’t want some content to be kept for the next generations.
I suppose not only me have this problem. Our life cycle covers two big epochs with different behaviors: analogue with rigorous selection of pictures, keeping memories and writing diaries and digital with constantly outdated devices, multiple pictures and rapid life. We are generating data all the time using digital. Our memory is moving to our smartphones and our Now moment is full of different activities. A put off moment probably would never become real because every moment we have something new and this put-off moment can be quickly outdated. All the digital media works on our Now attention, because nowadays we have a big choice and still have 24-hours.
Summing up all the facts and problems, my next step was to make a survey to prove or disprove my assumptions.
As a target audience I chose digital-experienced active users, open- minded, experience fans.
[WHY]
- digital is a simple quick tool of creating and keeping a story
- all the digital data we are generating and sharing will somehow be remembered in digital space for years
- as was mentioned earlier digital-experienced are the drivers of many industries including the funeral, sorry to say that.
I was recommended to speak to people who think of death, make planning, those who lost whom they love. We practically all lost someone whom we deeply love and we will. The research showed great projects that create inspiring solutions for this target audience. And Circle of life concept will be for all, because sorry to say that again, we will all die.
So, as a startup I need to focus on some specific audience, which includes speaking to people who unfortunately don’t think of death as a way to create an inspiring solution that will be easily integrated in current digital behavior.
Takeaways
- Celebration of life, or a life story, has a power for changing our perception of death.
- Storytelling as the key link between the life in the present and death.
- Personalized, eco-friendly practices and different funeral options are becoming popular.
- Time is against our choice.
- Local memory web-sites are popular because they have location connection and boundaries.
- Speak to audience on their language. (great example, to die = to check-out).
