Market researchers IBISWorld have just released their 2017 report titled: Funeral Directors, Crematoria and Cemeteries in Australia: Market Research Report.
Some of the key findings include:
Industry Threats & Opportunities
Industry operators have been promoting more personalised services to increase revenue
Industry players have been offering more value-added services to try to boost profitability
Burial fees are forecast to increase, as space restrictions limit supply in many cemeteries
Industry Analysis & Industry Trends
The financial performance of the Funeral Directors, Crematoria and Cemeteries industry is strongly influenced by the number of deaths in Australia each year. Medical advances, higher living standards and improved attitudes to health have helped lift the average life expectancy, slowing death-rate growth. However, rising costs for burials due to space restrictions over the past five years have prompted industry revenue to grow at a faster rate than the number of deaths, as well as encouraging a shift towards cremation. The increasing popularity of cremations has stifled industry revenue growth, as cremations typically generate less revenue per service.
Industry Report – Industry Analysis Chapter
Revenue for the Funeral Directors, Crematoria and Cemeteries industry is expected to grow steadily over the five years through 2017-18, due to rising numbers of deaths and higher household disposable incomes. However, funeral preferences have been changing over the past five years, constraining the industry’s pace of expansion, as input costs have risen and consumers have increasingly chosen cremations or basic funeral packages over more expensive burial options. Overall, industry revenue is projected to rise at an annualised 1.6% over the five years through 2017-18, to $1.1 billion. This includes a 1.7% increase in 2017-18 as the death rate rises close to its long-term average and greater numbers of cremation funerals constrain revenue growth.
Additional Insights for the Funeral Directors, Crematoria and Cemeteries Industry
The report identifies 250 Key Success Factors for a business for the Funeral Directors, Crematoria and Cemeteries Industry, being:
Access to the necessary amount of land/type of property
Having a good reputation
Membership of an industry organisation
The report also discusses how external factors such as number of deaths and Church attendance in the Funeral Directors, Crematoria and Cemeteries industry impact industry performance.
The full report is available for purchase from the IBISWorld website.
A tiny Spanish village of Las Nieves annually hosts the bizarre Fiesta de Santa Marta de Ribarteme.
The festival is dedicated to those fortunate enough to have managed to cheat death and is known as the Festival of Near Death Experiences.
Those that take part are carried through open coffins and caskets through the town and have at some point during the year survived an event or illness that could, and according to them should, have killed them.
The procession of family and friends of the ‘celebrants’ makes its way through the streets of the town where they have to carry their ‘escapee’ in his or her own coffin. Even more surreal is the vision of those in the parade without family or friends who struggle along carrying their own coffin.
This unusual yet popular fiesta is considered by some international media as among the weirdest festivities in the world and is dedicated to Saint Marta de Ribarteme, allegedly the sister of Lazarus – who rose from the dead.
The event is taken very seriously by those involved, and church bells ring out with solemnity throughout the parade.
During the 19th-century there was a widespread fear, particularly in the US, about ‘body-snatching’.
And, for good reason.
Medical institutions routinely stole buried cadavers to demonstrate medical procedures to their enthusiastic students. Also, grave robbing became a problem after the American Civil War, when ‘body-snatchers’ started looking to pilfer riches and precious jewels off recently-buried corpses.
Fortunately, clever inventors had a solution.
In 1878 Philip K Clover of Columbus, Ohio, came up with a device that would ward off would-be body-snatchers. His device? An exploding coffin, which he called a ‘coffin-torpedo’. The device involved a system of triggers that detonated an explosion of lead balls if the coffin lid was opened after burial.
He went on to receive a patent for the device, which in his words, “shall successfully prevent the unauthorized resurrection of dead bodies”.
Despite the interest at the time in graveyard artillery, there is little to suggest that these coffin-torpedoes were widely manufactured or commercially successful.
“For the most part, these devices seem to have been used very little,” says anthropologist Dr Kate Meyers Emery.
“They were definitely oddities designed to make money off of the widespread fear about body snatching. The truth is, most of the time you really just needed someone to watch over your grave for a few days or weeks to make sure that the body had time to decay and wouldn’t be of use.”
We’ve built a brand new Expression Coffins’ website that has an amazing, new, industry-first feature, that allows you to design your own coffin.
This is the perfect tool to use during funeral arrangements with families, or alternatively, families can design their loved one’s coffin from the comfort of their home. You may want to encourage people that are doing pre-arrangements to design their own coffin in advance too.
The design-your-own feature is both quick and easy for anyone to use. Families can supply their own images or select images from our database. Images can be uploaded and added to all the coffin surfaces (sides, ends and lid) and the 3D coffin can be spun around on your screen and edited live.
It’s a pleasure seeing one of our Expression Coffins leaving through our front gates – especially behind a Harley Davidson!! Particularly, when we know that it’s going to make a more meaningful funeral for a family.
Whether it’s motorcycles, movie memorabilia, mushroom hunting, model building or mud wrestling; we create amazing coffin designs to suit every family’s needs.
Whenever one of your client families suggests their loved one had a special interest or a passion for something, let them know that we can design a customised Expression Coffin just for them.
Source: IBISWorld Nov 2016 report
Source: IBISWorld Nov 2016 report
Source: IBISWorld Nov 2016 report
