ABSTRACT
I am no expert on death. Yes, I have a layman’s understanding of it. I have experienced it in many forms in my personal and professional lives. I have felt bereaved, visited tourist sites where death is commemorated, and made the heartbreaking yet humane decision to euthanize a beloved family pet. To date, however, I have not endeavored to undertake significant academic research that studies the many consumption-and marketing-related aspects of death I find so fascinating. I was initially drawn to the topic of death, and specifically to how consumption and marketing set up shop in the previously extremely private act of dying, when I was asked in 2008 to consult with a green burial organization in Massachusetts. The director had a dilemma: how to promote green (sustainable, eco-friendly – different terms, same coin) burials to consumers whose burial rituals were so firmly entrenched in their Christian beliefs that they remained intact, even through rituals detached from formal religious dogma; specifically, the ritual of dressing and enclosing their dead. This dilemma led to a consumer research question: How do we persuade Christian consumers to re-think the traditional rituals of clothing their loved ones in non-biodegradable garments and then burying them in polyurethane coffins? How do we get these same consumers to change deeply rooted, yet very toxic, burial practices in favor of more sustainable measures that at first glance will make them very uncomfortable, i.e., burying their loved ones without clothing or perhaps in a shroud; encasing them in a pine box; eliminating granite markers. The question piqued my intellectual curiosity so I turned to academic texts to give me some historical perspective
and insight into the phenomenon of death as a cultural construct. People of course have been writing about death since the first writers took pen to parchment, but what was heavily dissected in art form (books, plays, paintings, etc.) was noticeably absent in academic inquiry – what I found did not provide clarity. Faunce and Fulton (1958) noted several lacunae in sociology regarding death research but a curious overabundance of research that described and compared funeral rites and rituals of “other” cultures existed, particularly the fetishization of “nonwestern and nonliterate societies (p. 205).” Also during this time emerged an interesting sociological fascination with the “funeral director.” It seemed sociologists were comfortable studying death intermediaries because they were “safe.” They did not grieve for family members but instead provided a market mechanism for customs previously handled “in-house” or privately (cf. Barnhart, Huff, and Cotte 2014). The “death-care” industry has also been broached by economists and marketing researchers (Banks 1998; Kemp and Kopp 2010; Kopp and Kemp 2007; Quilliam 2008; Schwartz, Jolson, and Lee 2001) who analyzed the costs of burial and the regulations designed to protect consumers from unscrupulous practices. Beyond describing death rituals and dissecting the roles of intermediaries in the funeral business, social scientists have largely shied away from “messier” topics. Samuel claimed that
over the past century, death and sex have battled it out to be the number one unmentionable in America; these two topics are most reflective of our shame and embarrassment when it comes to all corporeal matters. But death has surged way ahead of sex as a “forbidden quotient”
(Samuel 2013, p. xiv)
and the literature acknowledges that “on a deeper level, death is a rich, metaphysical stew combining elements of philosophy, psychology, religion, anthropology, and sociology; its close relationship with theories about the afterlife makes the subject yet more intriguing (p. x).” The subject of death is rich, yet the taboo surrounding it prevents it from being copiously dissected. Manceau and Tissier-Desbordes (2006) found that 65 percent of French consumers believe it is unacceptable to show death in advertisements. Women are more likely than men to label death as taboo and age increases this discomfort. Death, like sex, has largely been ignored as a topic of inquiry within the field of marketing and consumer research, with the exceptions of Gabel, Mansfield, and Westbrook (1996); Gentry et al. (1995a; 1995b); O’Donohoe (2015); O’Donohoe and Turley (2000; 2007); Turley (1997; 2005; 2015); and Turley and O’Donohoe (2006; 2012), several of whom appear in this edited volume. This avoidance may be attributed to our general distress with the notion of death and dying; indeed, when I embarked upon this project I received many strange looks and comments like “how depressing!” and “that’s morbid.” Strangely, the taboos surrounding death (similar to the topic
of sex) were just as prevalent in our field as they were with the general public. I found this particularly fascinating given the media’s wide ranging coverage on death-related marketing and consumption. Consumers visit celebrity gravesites, write negative obituaries about a parent who abused them, attempt to clone a beloved pet, contest wills and estates, use all manner of tactics to dispose of a deceased loved one’s possessions, consider sustainable burials, choose to grieve in public and on the internet, and curiously, hire strippers to perform at funerals (“Strippers perform at funerals in rural China,” April 24, 2015). As such, I was compelled to create a larger dialogue on the topic of death, specifically as it relates to consumer behavior and cultural practices. I envision this book as a “touchstone,” a starting point, for those scholars interested in studying death, and this introduction as a scholarly map of the broad terrain death occupies in consumer culture (think treasure map vs. Google Maps™). Five general research themes emerged as a result of canvassing the literature on death: (1) mortality salience; (2) rituals and rites; (3) bereavement; (4) disposition of possessions; and (5) death consumption. Being that these themes are similar to those introduced by Turley and O’Donohoe (2012) in their much more comprehensive review of the literature on death, I will briefly introduce each as a service to scholars interested in learning more. First, mortality salience is a psychological construct that measures the degree to which subjects fear death. Disturbingly, it is typically “manipulated” in a lab setting, i.e., subjects are made to feel like death is either impending or remote, and it has been linked to a variety of consumption behaviors (see Ferrarro, Shiv, and Bettman 2005). Death Anxiety is a related construct that is also manipulated in lab studies. It represents a corollary to mortality salience in that it reflects the degree to which someone fears the state of not existing (Tomer and Eliason 2006). For example, Gale (2014) found that depictions of death in ads amplified consumers’ feelings of worry, catastrophe and negative stereotyping. As mentioned earlier, sociologists and anthropologists have studied rituals and rites ad nauseam. However, the focus of these studies has been on the death rituals practiced by remote tribes in developing countries to the complete exclusion of the death rituals practiced by western and other literate societies. Bonsu and Belk (2003) provided a notable exception by focusing less on the uniqueness of Ghanan customs and more on the ways in which death consumption rituals were part of a person’s identity project that survived, and even changed, upon the person’s death. They also contributed to the discourse on death and consumption by linking death-related consumption to what Metcalfe (1981) identified as “the ritual economy,” a term that describes how consumers will expand or contract the “range of social and cultural capital” they expend on a specific ritual depending upon their actual or aspirational social class. The ritual itself does not structurally change but “telescopes in scale, to expand or contract in the grandness with which it is celebrated, without any essential change in format or rationale (p. 563).”
