BY QUINN EAGAN

      Last year, when I was speaking at the National Funeral Director's Association convention, I attended the main session at which Christine Pepper, the organization's executive director, discussed the role of tradition in the funeral industry. One main point: our product - the casket - hasn't changed much in 40 years.
     Now that's true, but it started me thinking about many dramatic shifts in the industry that have occurred in my 26 years. For example:
   -Drastic increases in the cremation rate.
  -Fewer people attending visitations and religious services, and fewer people even visiting gravesites after the first year.
  -Funerals - once routinely sched-uled over two days - now compressed into a morning or afternoon.
  -Shrinking profit margins for funeral homes.

at a beach volleyball game, with the pallbearers serving, and another conducted at the local yacht club, where mourners fired the gun traditionally used to end races. There have been candlelight visitations, balloon and dove releases - I even heard of one family that released more than 100 butterflies at the gravesite.
    All of those wonderful funerals uniquely fit the deceased, but realistically, most funeral directors won’t become event planners. Most families won’t think up such ideas themselves. The challenge for us is learning to provide unique experiences within current business practice. Adapting is much smarter than fighting. I recently went back and worked four funerals and was shocked that three were half-day visitations with burial the same day. I don't know if it's families or funeral home directors that are too busy, but

     In my quarter-century, most funeral homes have raised prices significantly. Those price increases (other than cost of living) came from two major sources:
    1. As conglomerates seized control of the industry, they often paid enormous premiums while buying up funeral homes. Then they made up the difference by raising prices.
    2. When the FTC required homes to keep a goods and services sheet, many rethought their pricing, seeking to create more profits at the margins.
   The end result is a lingering impression that funerals cost even more than they actually do and consumers still spending thousands on services they deem of low value.
   How then do I propose handling competition from direct cremation? Sell as many of the lingering traditional services as preneed services, before cremation becomes the new tradition. At the same time,

The challenge for us is learning to provide unique experiences within
current business practices. Adapting is much smarter than fighting.

   All our research indicates that many families want to avoid assembly-line funerals and interpret “value” to mean “greater person-alization.” The industry has responded with features such as memory drawers, cap panels, stick-on corners, funeral motifs and all that good stuff. But as one speaker (from the Harvard Business School, no less) at our annual preneed retreat concluded after having worked with three groups of funeral directors from around the country, those additions still focus on products, not experiences.
    Some progressive funeral direc-tors have begun making efforts to improve the funeral experience for mourners, plunging into new roles as event planners. I know of one funeral conducted courtside current

               NEW DIRECTIONS
   Cremation, for example, now represents a permanent sector of the market. When I started out more than two decades ago, it was a non-entity in the marketplace. Today, crema-tions now make up half of many funeral homes' business, and in most cases, at least 25 percent of their call volume.
     Why did that happen? Do families actually prefer incinerating deced-ents over burying them? Or does cremation provide an alternative to something - conventional funerals - that have diminished in value in those 20-odd years? Let's think about that for a few paragraphs. start offering new cremation  packaging

options and services. I mean, it should be obvious that the cremation industry is here to stay. When I started out more than two decades ago, it was a non-factor. Don't assume families want direct cremation, ask them about what package they prefer. Begin to adapt your cremation packages/services (as well as your traditional offerings), keeping in mind an aphorism a director named Frank Stewart told me 15 years ago: Everyone wants to be remembered. No one wants to be forgotten. When you discuss preneed offerings with a client, help them choose services that will truly honor their memory.
    Even if you feel content with your current offerings - that the families in your customer base are completely satisfied - whoever gets your business when you pass it on will

probably still want to enhance its future value. More importantly, they will probably want to offer endlessly improving services and increasing opportunities to an expanding customer base. That's going to take some study and effort. I can help a bit: I'm building a database of the best funerals. Readers should e-mail me stories about the best funerals they've seen in the past five years

    The best funerals I've attended - and the studies show are consistently regarded as best - are

 the ones where memories were shared openly amongst all who were attending. Such funerals provide more than a great tribute to the deceased; they provide a group healing process. It provides the value that families want with a final goodbye. And that's a concept easy to communicate when selling preneed funerals. Who doesn't want to be remembered?