Funeral Service Merchandising College textbook

This book was designed to meet two broad goals:1. Provide a modern and progressive textbook for mortuary science students taking college courses of instruction in the mortuary sciences to prepare them for entering the workforce.2. Provide a detailed and relevant reference book for current funeral service professionals, thereby providing them with the knowledge and information they need to meet the challenges of a rapidly changing funeral service industry.The funeral service community needs to embrace current trends and movements, and view them as opportunities to offer additional goods and services, especially those designed to attract the ever more astute and cost-conscious consumer. Funeral service suppliers and vendors are actively expanding inventories to include these new products, with an emphasis on those that customize and personalize a funeral service. Funeral directors with a focus on injecting these new and innovative goods and services into their offerings will most certainly be successful in maintaining future business goals and objectives.

The blogger behind Confessions of a Funeral Director—what Time magazine called a "must read"—reflects on mortality and the powerful lessons death holds for every one of us in this compassionate and thoughtful spiritual memoir that combines the humor and insight of Smoke Gets in Your Eyes with the poignancy and brevity of When Breath Becomes Air. We are a people who deeply fear death. While humans are biologically wired to evade death for as long as possible, we have become too adept at hiding from it, vilifying it, and—when it can be avoided no longer—letting the professionals take over. Sixth-generation funeral director Caleb Wilde understands this reticence and fear. He had planned to get as far away from the family business as possible. He wanted to make a difference in the world, and how could he do that if all the people he worked with were . . . dead? Slowly, he discovered that caring for the deceased and their loved ones was making a difference—in other people’s lives to be sure, but it also seemed to be saving his own. A spirituality of death began to emerge as he observed: The family who lovingly dressed their deceased father for his burial The act of embalming a little girl that offered a gift back to her grieving family The nursing home that honored a woman’s life by standing in procession as her body was taken away The funeral that united a conflicted community Through stories like these, told with equal parts humor and poignancy, Wilde offers an intimate look into the business and a new perspective on living and dying

This book was designed and written with two goals in mind:1. Provide a modern and progressive textbook for funeral service students to prepare them for national board examinations and, thereafter, entering the workforce as skilled professionals.2. Provide a detailed and relevant reference book for new and current funeral service professionals, thereby providing them with the knowledge and information needed to meet the challenges of a rapidly changing funeral service industry.

Situated at the crossroads of visual culture and consumerism, this essay collection examines visual merchandising as both a business and an art. It seeks to challenge that scholarly ambivalence that often celebrates the spectacle but denies the agenda of consumerism. The volume considers strategies in the imaging of selling from the mid nineteenth century to the present, in terms of the visual interaction that occurs between the commodity and the consumer and between body and space. Under the categories of Promotion, Product and Place, contributors to the volume examine the strategies in the presentation of retail goods and environments that range from print advertising to product design to store display and architecture. Visual Merchandising: The Image of Selling is located directly at the nexus of business practice and cultural myth, where the spectator never loses sight of their status as buyer and the object of desire is always still a commodity.