Monumental Sales Tips - Top trends changing the industry are challenges, not threats to monument builders

By Mike Baklarz

There are many monument builders whose business is based on selling simple upright monuments in gray, black or flat colors through word-of-mouth and customer referrals. Those days are fast coming to an end. In order to survive in the future, monument builders will have to customize monuments to meet fast-changing consumer preferences and promote their products and services with comprehensive sales and marketing strategies.

It is critical to understand the trends that will irreversibly change the way people memorialize. Let's look at the big picture and outline the key trends that will impact your business.

Fragmentation

The majority of people 50 years ago lived in communities where they were born for most of their lives. They never would have thought of another option than the traditional burial. Now, as many as five members of a three-generation family may be living in five different cities or towns. Each may end up hopping to two or three more places before finally settling down. Fragmentation has eroded family traditions and reverence for long-practiced customs. Fragmentation will further accelerate with more one-parent and dual-income families and Baby Boomers - Americans aged 39 to 57 who make up 30 percent of the population - who are less likely to have traditional burials.

Shifting consumer preferences

Most Americans never gave much thought to adding different granite colors, bronze features, or having their favorite hobbies, pastimes or life stories graphically diamond- or laser-etched on their memorials before. They are now. Because ours is such a unique industry - you don't hear of people excitedly talking about features they'll have on their memorials - not much research is available about specific memorial preferences. But one thing is for sure. You are not going to do brisk business if you keep selling the same memorials as you have in the past. Warmer, more vibrant granite colors incorporated with new designs and features, including bronze (yes, bronze), and the customization of memorials is where the industry is heading.

Personalization and the Boomers

The Boomers will be the largest memorialization market this generation, but differ from their parents. Principled and highly idealistic, they are less likely to spend more money on funerals or traditional rituals; stand out as the first generation in the United States that is used to being marketed to, and they will expect to be marketed to with new choices and memorialization options. Like everything in the United States that stands for value, Boomers will put a premium on personalization and will want their memorials personalized with features, carvings, and designs and touches reflecting the good times they had in life. They will also want to be memorialized in settings or different environments that reflect their personal lives or wishes, such as in a cremation garden (the nation's first cemetery primarily for cremains, the Mariposa Gardens, was built in Arizona three years ago).

Cremation

Although nearly half of the four million people forecast to pass away in 2025 will choose cremation, a large number of people opting for cremation will want to be memorialized with granite memorials. There will always be a group preferring to be scattered or put in an urn identified by a modest plaque or marker. Price is one reason why people choose cremation but many are unaware of the many memorial choices for cremation. No matter what form of memorialization, if people are given dignified choices there will always be a group that will opt for nice memorials for cremation or granite cremorials. Most firms have yet to fully develop a wider range of granite cremorials for a rapidly expanding market that is largely unaware of these options.

Rather than view these key developments as factors that are likely to hurt your business, it is our duty to adapt and develop memorials that will satisfy the personalization needs of the memorialized and their families. After all, the cardinal principle in our business is that it is not strictly a business but an intensely personal vocation involving life and death and, more recently, one that celebrates life rather than mourns death. If families or people seeking memorialization information find out there is no product from you to suit their needs, you will never get their business. You may have the range of products and personalization capabilities, but if families and customers never learn about them through sales promotion, public relations and marketing activities, they won't buy from you. If you can adapt, however, and develop new products and promote and market them effectively, the trends you are looking at now are nothing but the most exciting challenges facing you.

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Mike Baklarz is senior vice president of sales and marketing for the Cold Spring Granite Co., a leading manufacturer, designer and distributor of granite and bronze products. The Cold Spring Granite Memorial Group offers the broadest line of memorial products, including upright monuments, flat markers, cast bronze and granite bases, urns, columbariums, community, and family mausoleums, benches, and specialty features.

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