Abstract

"Managing Visibility in Taboo Markets: Divergent Approaches to Funerary Entrepreneurship in the 20th Century"

Jan Logemann, University of Bonn (jan.logemann@wiwi.uni-goettingen.de)

Visibility – whether through advertising, communal involvement or architecture - is a crucial aspect of marketing and entrepreneurship. Typically, businesses seek increased visibility, but, in culturally sensitive “taboo markets” visibility can also be a liability and a threat to legitimacy. The commercial deathcare industry, which emerged on both sides of the Atlantic in the decades around 1900, faced reputational challenges and public criticism since its inception. In many ways, funerals were a ‘taboo market’ and industry professionals soon saw the need to ‘legitimize’ their businesses. Carefully staging visibility became an important means to this end, but, depending on different social, cultural and regulatory contexts, funeral businesses developed very different strategies over the course of the twentieth century.
This paper analyses comparatively the marketing and publicity efforts by German and U.S.-American funeral firms. While they faced many similar challenges (e.g. critiques of immoral profiteering, market collusion, manipulative business practices), they developed strikingly different responses. The German funeral profession increasingly promoted understated funerals and limited the visibility both of so-called ‘Funeral Institutes’ and of the dead themselves. Advertising for deathcare services, too, became almost minimalist by the 1950s. American ‘Funeral Homes’ by contrast, advertised prominently in their communities and made the ‘viewing’ for the deceased, frequently in a lavishly adorned settings, a cornerstone of their business model. To understand such differences, the paper delves into the trade literature and business records from both countries, but also into their respective public debates surrounding the co-creation of “legitimate” business in deathcare.