The economic state of our country is forcing many companies to diversify themselves into new products as well as new industries, and funeral industry companies have not been excluded from this diversification.
Lets look at Batesville Casket company. In the last 12 months they have purchase a burial vault company, a funeral home website company, and a non-funeral industry company.
Batesville’s primary product and their name to fame has been their high quality caskets, but it seems now that burial vaults have been added to their product line their story on casket protection is changing.
Here is what I mean, for all the years that Batesville has been consulting with and providing services and sales techniques to funeral homes they have been enforcing to funeral directors that protection provided by a high end gasketed casket is all that the consumer needs, protection provided by a burial vault is secondary.
As someone with a background in the burial vault manufacturing business I have tried to help funeral directors convey the message to the consumer that the protection provided from a burial not only protects the remains but also the casket to stop the intrusion of outer elements of the earth, damage from ground weight, and from the heavy equipment used by cemeteries. Now that Batesville is selling burial vaults, their sales collateral is saying what us vault people have been saying for years. The sad thing for Batesville is that this goes against everything the have built their casket sales presentation around.
Here is one of the pieces of sales material for Batesville’s new Endura burial vault obtained by Connecting Directors:
So what story is Batesville going to stick with now? What is really providing the most protection, the casket or burial vault?
Looks like Batesville has a decision to make, one that could totally change the direction of their company.
