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May 2004 YB News
By Michael T. Baklarz
Ours is the most abundant age in history where consumers can choose a product from hundreds of different versions, including memorials and memorial services. In our era of conspicuous consumption and companies feverishly churning out more patents, products and brands, variety can confuse just as much benefit consumers. Variety necessarily doesn't mean better. Consumers want customization more than variety. They want products to best suit their tastes and needs.
People can spend hours explaining everything about a product or a service and how options and features can be customized. The consumer may not be satisfied because, if it is a purchase involving hundreds or thousands of dollars, the customer has probably spent some time researching the product on the Internet. Your informed customers are seeking a lot more these days.
As C. K. Prahalad and Venkat Ramaswamy write in The Future of Competition, Co-Creating Unique Value with Customers, "Companies can no longer act autonomously, designing products, developing production processes, crafting marketing messages, and controlling channels with little or no interference from consumers. Consumers now seek to exercise their influence in every part of the business system."
Companies can't afford to be "company-centric" and believe that they are the ones creating value, the authors point out. They need to be "consumer-centric" and actively engage consumers to co-create value of products that customers, after all, will buy. Forward-looking firms are already doing this. In customized construction, home building for example, consumers expect to join in every step of the design and building process.
The authors bring up another example of a houseboat manufacturer that invites customers to create value at every stage of the production process, from design to tracking product development on the factory floor. The greater the engagement, the more satisfaction and self-esteem it brings to customers, who become more knowledgeable about the product. The transparency and willingness of the houseboat firm to dialogue with customers to modify designs and develop new features enables customers to trust the company and believe in the quality of its product. The dialogue and transparency also motivates engineers and developers of the manufacturer to be responsive to customers' needs.
No company can completely let the consumer control value-creation. That might affect the functionality or structural integrity of a product or feasibility of a service. Neither can a firm devote too much time for value-creation for commodity-type products. But value-co-creation is something that memorialization firms should adopt more intensively. Many already are. Proactive cemetery counselors explain all the steps that families need to know about arranging for a memorial and service and recommend options and plans based on families' preferences. Memorial companies, especially ones developing higher-end memorials, conduct much dialogue with families to come up with designs that reflect the families' personalization interests through customization.
Value-co-creation is second nature to our industry, which puts a premium on personalization. It can be further developed to benefit customers by enhancing personalization experienced through basic dimensions that the authors describe as events, context, individual involvement and personal meaning.
Anything and everything can be described as an event. Reading this column, believe it or not, is an event. A football game is an event. The game can be broken down into many sub-events, such as a huddle, a play, the two-minute warning, a star player returning from an injury in the last minute of the game, and so on. There is an opportunity to personalize every event that your customer will experience with you, from entering the grounds of your cemetery (an usher can stand by to assist families); meeting in a counseling room (fresh coffee can be prepared and the room furnished with distinctive memorial displays and posters); and taking a cemetery tour (a counselor specifically qualified to assist the family interested in a particular form of memorialization can be selected for the tour). The context and manner in which such events are experienced influence families' willingness to work and co-create value of memorialization products and services with you.
It's easier to talk about individual involvement when it comes to ordering books through Amazon.com or ordering movies through services like Netflix that recommend movies you are likely to enjoy based on past viewings. Memorialization is a serious matter affecting families grieving from the loss of loved ones. Creating individual involvement in this context is critical. For example, recounting how another family coped with loss and personalized a memorial - in a process that may have involved value co-creation of the memorial while it was being developed for the family - is one way to bring personalized experiences to families facing similar situations.
Ultimately the goal is to provide personal meaning to grieving families who want to memorialize loved ones while also seeking emotional closure for themselves. Whether personalizing memorial arrangements or memorials through customized fabrication, different families want different levels of involvement and personalization. Care should be taken to explore, understand and meet those needs by intensively dialoguing with families and encouraging them to co-create value for their families' memorialization products and services.
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Michael T. Baklarz is vice president of business development for the Memorial Group of the Cold Spring Granite Co., a leading fabricator, 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 memorials with granite bases, urns, columbariums, cremation memorials, community and family mausoleums, benches, and specialty cemetery features. For more information, visit www.coldspringgranite.com.
Michael T. Baklarz has 25 years of diverse experience in sales, marketing, finance, and strategic planning and is an active member of the Monument Builders of North America and International Cemetery and Funeral Association. He attended the U.S. Naval Academy for two years and completed his undergraduate degree at Duquesne University. He also holds a master's degree in business administration from Ashland College.
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