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Death
Anxiety Costing Consumers Thousands Due to Refusal to Plan Ahead
June
8, 2005 – “My death? The death of someone in my family? I don’t want to
think about it.” This anxiety about death costs consumers thousands of
dollars in end-of-life products and services, because they refuse to
plan ahead.
Marketing researchers at the University of Arkansas have found that
contemplating death and considering the important decisions to be made
at the end of one’s life can empower families as responsible consumers
and prevent them from spending more money than they want to on funerals
or memorial services.
“If
you can get people to plan ahead, that reduces the chances they’ll get
ripped off,” said Steven Kopp, associate professor of marketing at the
UA’s Sam M. Walton College of Business.
Kopp
said even experts in his field – consumer marketing – are not immune to
a resistance to thinking about death, so he and Swinder Janda, a UA
alumnus and associate professor at Kansas State University, decided to
study how feelings about death influence decisions about purchasing
end-of-life products and services. They wanted to discover how different
levels of “death anxiety,” defined as “an unpleasant emotional state
precipitated by contemplation of one’s own death,” affect consumer
behavior. Specifically, Kopp and Janda sought to understand the
relationship between a person’s self-assessment of health and
involvement with decisions such as purchasing a casket or opting for
cremation.
“People walk around all the time, every day, being afraid of dying,”
Kopp said. “Some of this has to carry over into consumption. It affects
our behavior on some level.”
To
prepare for a broader study, the researchers used results from a
preliminary survey of 305 people to explore consumption behavior as it
relates to purchasing end-of-life products and services. They discovered
that people with lower levels of death anxiety are generally inclined to
make quicker, simpler and more economical purchasing decisions about
end-of-life products. In other words, people who are relatively less
anxious about death are not as concerned about purchasing elaborate
burials and caskets, and are not willing to spend as much time and
effort shopping for such products.
The
researchers also identified factors that influence degrees of death
anxiety. They discovered that people who perceive themselves to be
healthy will experience low levels of death anxiety. In addition, those
who perceive themselves to have more control over their own health will
also be less anxious about death. Furthermore, Kopp and Janda found that
current health status plays a greater role in influencing death anxiety
for younger people. For older people, self-assessment of how much
control they have over their own health plays a greater role in
influencing death anxiety.
Kopp
said several funeral-industry and consumer-advocate studies fuel
additional questions that he and Janda hope to answer. One national
survey reported that three out of four consumers believe that
prearranging for the disposition of their remains upon death made good
sense. Yet only one out of every four had actually made such plans.
Another study stated that for most consumers the purchase of a funeral
and its related merchandise will be the third most expensive purchase of
one’s life following the purchase of a house and an automobile.
Kopp
emphasized that there is little systematic assessment of the
effectiveness of governmental or consumer-oriented programs meant to
inform people about pre-planning and death-care alternatives.
“Nearly all people in the United States will be involved in some type of
end-of-life purchase decision,” Kopp said, “But funeral-related
purchases are generally made without prior knowledge of needs,
requirements, costs, or available alternatives. These decisions are also
made under substantial time pressures and during times when the buyer is
in a state of emotional vulnerability.”
Kopp
said a resistance to thinking about death is probably responsible for
the lack of rigorous, thorough research on consumer attitudes and
behavior about purchasing end-of-life products and services.
“In
marketing, we often talk about products people generally do not shop
for,” he said. “Sometimes this is because they just don’t think about
it, and sometimes it’s because they don’t want to think about it. So, we
are trying to identify some consumer characteristics that would be
related to peoples’ purchases of death-related products and services.”
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