By Thomas A. Parmalee I’ve often thought about writing a book on event planning, but I’m not so sure it would sell enough copies to be worth the effort. But every once in a while, something comes up as it relates to planning an event that I feel compelled to…
Read MoreBy Rick Gershman is the Vice President of Messaging & Content for Ring Ring Marketing Today, online reviews are incredibly important to your funeral home. Most families take at least a cursory look at your firm's overall review score, particularly on Google, before calling you. And that's true even if…
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Alan Creedy and Danny Jefferson, two funeral service innovators who host a popular podcast called “Two Guys and a Question,” interviewed a death-care marketing veteran to share a myriad of insights in their latest episode. Their special guest was Joe Weigel, owner of Weigel Strategic Marketing, who provides an array…
Read MoreBy Thomas A. Parmalee Mark Davis, 66, grew up in New Jersey, but it wasn’t until he moved to Fort Lauderdale, Florida a couple of weeks before his sixteenth birthday that he found himself thinking about funeral service. At Piper High School in Sunrise, Florida in the mid-1970s, he and…
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Alan Creedy and Danny Jefferson, two funeral service innovators who host a popular podcast, shared a myriad of insights with guest speaker Bill Johnston on their latest episode of “Two Guys and a Question.” Breaking with tradition of hosting an episode in 12 minutes or less, Creedy and Jefferson dived…
Read MoreBy Thomas A. Parmalee George Owens, the president of SoCal Approach Marketing and Consulting Group, got his start at one of America’s most iconic companies: J.D. Power & Associates, a global leader in consumer insights, advisory services and data and analytics. The firm was only about 25 years old when…
Read MoreFuneralVision.com recently launched a free weekly newsletter on LinkedIn to keep death-care professionals and their allies better informed. While various names for the newsletter were considered, Thomas Parmalee, founder of FuneralVision.com, ultimately decided on the simplest one he could think of: Funeral Service News. “Frankly, I was surprised that no…
Read MoreBy Thomas A. Parmalee Funeral homes will rightfully go to incredible lengths to get members of the community to visit their facilities, whether that means hosting an open house, inviting residents to a pizza and preplan extravaganza, showing a movie or teaming up with another community organization to conduct a…
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By Thomas A. Parmalee Whether it’s developing marketing for an event, a yearlong campaign, collateral material, or something else, Rolf Gutknecht finds inspiration everywhere. The president and CEO of LA ads, a full-service marketing firm that serves the death-care market, Gutknecht (pronounced “Goot-neck,” which means “good servant” in German) leads…
Read MoreBy Thomas A. Parmalee When you sell caskets and urns on Amazon.com, Walmart.com, the Sam’s Club website and through Costco Next, which offers discounted prices from third-party sellers – and your company is repeatedly featured in mainstream media outlets, you’re going to capture the attention of funeral directors. Titan Casket…
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By Thomas A. Parmalee By now, you’ve probably seen “The Burial,” starring Tommy Lee Jones and Jaime Foxx, which is loosely based on the true story of lawyer Willie E. Gary and his client, Jeremiah Joseph O’Keefe, who sued the Loewen Funeral Group and won a massive verdict. “Loosely” is…
Read MoreAlan Creedy and Danny Jefferson tackle another big question in the latest episode of “Two Guys and a Question,”a podcast where the two industry stalwarts focus on key issues facing funeral directors to stimulate debate and collaboration. The latest episode, titled “When Tasks Defeat Purpose,” highlights some simple ways funeral…
Read MoreBy Thomas A. Parmalee I do a lot of networking on LinkedIn … and I notice a lot of errors when reviewing profiles. Fortunately, most of the time when I notice someone has misspelled their job title, the headline on their profile or committed some other egregious error, they are…
Read MoreFuneralVision has ridden a wave of success and transitioned from being located at FuneralVision.org to FuneralVision.com -- just nine months after being introduced to the death-care profession. Thomas A. Parmalee, the founder of the site, said the move makes sense. "When I started the site, I wanted to come up…
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