This article is from WeChat official account:New Retail Business Review (ID: xinlingshou1001) , author: Tianqiao Yun, from the head of FIG: “Departures” stills
Franklin once said a sentence that still seems to be very classic: There are two inevitable events in a person’s life. One is taxation and the other is death.
Like birth, death is an inevitable stop for everyone in the journey of life. The difference is that modern Chinese have completely opposite attitudes towards life and death.
“Born to rejoice and go to grief” seems to have been established by convention, and death and “following matters” have often become taboos in daily communication. Therefore, when people have to face the consequences of their loved ones, they will be at a loss again.
Not long ago, Mr. Yan’s relatives (pseudonym) passed away in his sleep. In sorrow and panic, Mr. Yan searched for an agency that provided “one-stop” funeral services.
Originally thinking that “one-stop” can save snacks, but the service staff’s offer shocked him-a mahogany urn was priced at more than 40,000, plus seven or eighty-eight services, flower baskets and other expenses, one A medium-sized funeral can’t be done without 100,000 yuan.
Fortunately, a relative who had just had a funeral introduced his experience, so Mr. Yan retired from the “one-stop” service and contacted the funeral home directly. Although a lot of energy was involved, in the end, it only cost more than 20,000 yuan to have a funeral of higher specifications than the one provided by one dragon. According to Mr. Yan, there is a price difference of nearly 10 times for the cinerary casket alone.
Mr. Yan’s experience is not an isolated case, and the chaos in the funeral industry has a long history.
According to estimates by the Qianzhan Industry Research Institute, the market size of China’s funeral and interment industry in 2020 will be around 500 billion yuan. The China Funeral Association predicts that China’s funeral and interment industry will reach 1 trillion yuan by 2023.
So, how is this industry different from other industries? What is the problem of the funeral and interment industry, which is criticized as “extraordinary profits”? When the sun of the Internet shines on people’s back, what can it bring to the industry and consumers?
The regret of the lack of life culture
If you ask everyone to give an adjective about “death”, most people will choose “fear.”
The source of fear is unknown, because I don’t know what the result will be, so I’m afraid—this is both scientific explanation and human instinct. Therefore, it is understandable that death is feared because of the unknown, and taboo because of fear.
But in fact, the Chinese did not shy away from talking about life and death at first.
In the view of Marley, the founder of “Yikong.com”, there is a Chinese term called “coffin book”, which can be regarded as the best explanation of the ancestor’s view of life and death. “Old people in the past often used to be in good health. Just save a sum of money to plan for yourself, this is the end of life.”
However, with the acceleration of urbanization and the intensification of the flow of people, more and more people are leaving their hometowns, and the transmission of traditional customs and culture is gradually being cut off.
These series of factors have gradually reduced the ways for modern people to receive life education, and the revival of the culture of life and death is becoming the direction of the joint efforts of the entire funeral industry.
“It is natural to attract people to our memorial garden by way of tourism. In this scene, it is natural to popularize the concept of life and death and ultimate care for everyone.”
Chen Ping, senior vice president and chief executive officer of the Memorial Park of Taikang Health Investment, believes that life education is of great significance to contemporary people. People understand life and fear life.
Currently, Taikang has four memorial parks across the country. In addition to turning the traditional cemetery into a memorial garden with a special theme, it has also made functional innovations. One part is to meet the needs of customers for sacrifice and sweeping, and the other part is to provide cultural and travel services for the public.
Taikang’s Jingshan Bamboo Tea Academy in Hangzhou does not see the gloomy scene of a traditional cemetery at all. The sacrificial cleaning room is designed to look like the living room of ordinary people’s families. When people need to worship their relatives, they can enter through the entrance guard. The fully automatic conveyor belt will send the urn stored in the niche to the sacrificial cleaning room. After the sacrifice is completed, the urn will be automatically transported back to the niche.
In the Luofu Mountain Memorial Park in Huizhou, Taikang not only introduced meditation culture, but also built a funeral culture museum to let people understand the ancient Chinese funeral culture, and at the same time have a more objective and rational understanding of life and death.
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