Death in a Consumer Culture

Susan Dobscha, Susan Dobscha

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781317536185
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Business General
• Index: Business

Death has never been more visible to consumers. From life insurance to burial plots to estate planning, we are constantly reminded of consumer choices to be made with our mortality in mind. Religious beliefs in the afterlife (or their absence) impact everyday consumption activities.

Death in a Consumer Culture presents the broadest array of research on the topic of death and consumer behaviour across disciplinary boundaries. Organised into five sections covering: The Death Industry; Death Rituals; Death and Consumption; Death and the Body; and Alternate Endings, the book explores topics from celebrity death tourism, pet and online memorialization; family history research, to alternatives to traditional corpse disposal methods and patient-assisted suicide. Work from scholars in history, religious studies, sociology, psychology, anthropology, and cultural studies sits alongside research in marketing and consumer culture. From eastern and western perspectives, spanning social groups and demographic categories, all explore the ubiquity of death as a physical, emotional, cultural, social, and cosmological inevitability.

Offering a richly unique anthology on this challenging topic, this book will be of interest to researchers working at the intersections of consumer culture, marketing and mortality.

Part I
The death industry

1
Proclaiming modernity in the monument trade

Barre Granite, Vermont Marble, and national advertising, 1910–1932¹

Bruce S. Elliott

Advertisements for cemetery monuments have been a feature of national mass market magazines for just over a century, but they were the product of a specific modernizing moment: a late realization that gravestones could be advertised as consumer products. Some in the stone trades thought monuments “non-advertisable” to the general public. This was not primarily because they were associated with death, for the nineteenth-century “rural cemetery” movement and Victorian gravestone iconography of hands pointing heavenward with the affirmation “Gone Home” evidence a long-standing sentimentalization of death and a focus on memory and heavenly reunion. It was a marketing problem: monuments were a product acquired once in a lifetime when death precipitated need (Hirschbaum 1927). There was a “progressive” faction within the industry, however, who were convinced of the value of advertisement (Printer’s Ink 1919: p. 41; American Stone Trade 1916: p. 29). They would not only move gravestone advertising into the national consumer marketplace, but shift its content beyond the ubiquitous Victorian assurances of quality and economy to the commodification of sentiment and memory, in the more comfortable window of pre-need sale.

Giddens has argued, however, that central to modernity was the discomfiting distanciation of social relations over time and space and with their disembedding from local face-to-face contexts a growing dependence on impersonal mechanisms and expert systems (Giddens 1990: pp. 21, 26–28). In the monument trade, consumer trust in local craftsmen who learned the business through apprenticeship gave way uneasily to industrial production and national corporate structures. (Elliott 2011: p. 16) Wholesalers in quarry towns were supplying distant stonecutters with finished monuments, lacking only the inscriptions, by the 1870s. Local materials and iconographic forms gave way to white marble, then granite, as transportation improvements, metropolitan taste, and new technologies standardized monument types (Gilmore 1956: p. 16; Elliott 2011: p. 39).

Distanciated relationships among producer, retailer, and consumer were mediated by new communications mechanisms: trade publications, business associations, and credit reporting mitigated the uncertainties of business relationships disembedded from local contexts, and fostered trust in professional expertise and technological innovation. Late additions were the professional advertising agency² and the mass market consumer magazine. Though the bulk of production was now taking place further up the supply chain, local monument dealers required reassurance that retail sales would remain their preserve when retail advertising, too, went national. This chapter explores the roots of corporate branding and national consumer advertising in the monument trade in the context of growing corporate hegemony and the mediating influence of advertising professionals. An equally important factor in the adoption of national campaigns, however, was the competition for market share that underlay the marble/granite transition. This chapter therefore will compare the marketing strategies adopted by the Vermont marble and granite interests.

David Nye postulated that marketing most products relied upon personal connection or recommendation until the 1880s, when monopolies and corporations emerged that were large enough to manage a nation-wide distribution system (Nye 1985: p. 113). In the monument trade, however, national advertising was pioneered not by the industry’s closest thing to a monopoly, the Vermont Marble Company, but by the upstart Barre, Vermont, granite industry. The marble and granite industries were differently structured. The newer granite industry was more fragmented, but its corporate leaders proved more willing to adopt modern marketing innovations to increase their market share at the expense of the older, more consolidated marble trade.

Antecedents of Vermont Marble were wholesaling white marble slabs via the expanding rail network by the 1850s. Aggressive entrepreneur Redfield Proctor consolidated a number of quarry firms and finishing plants to create the vertically integrated Vermont Marble Company in 1880. By 1912 VMC controlled 45 percent of American marble production, but its third president, Frank Partridge, was much less expansionist and aggressive. Lacking a Redfield Proctor, the granite industry remained less integrated. The railway, moreover, came to Barre only in 1875, 25 years after it reached Proctor (Busdraghi 2012: pp. 26–28; Gilmore 1957: 17), and it was only in the 1890s that pneumatic tools streamlined the carving of the harder and more durable granite (Elliott 2011: pp. 37–38). In 1915 some 30 quarry firms supplied rough granite to 160 manufacturers who in turn sold to dealers (Printers’ Ink 1919: pp. 43–44). Only in 1930 would the largest Barre quarry firm enter the wholesale monument trade itself as a vertically integrated corporation (Clarke 1989, 62; Boston Herald 1930: p. 30).

Most Barre manufacturers did belong to a local Association, founded in 1886 as a response to unionization (Wishart 1911: p. 9). As production consolidated, advertising agencies convinced the manufacturers to brand their products and advertise direct to consumers. The Manufacturers Association adopted Barre Granite as a trademark in December 1910, aspiring to achieve the kind of national dominance Vermont Marble enjoyed (Monumental News 1911: p. 94), and taking inspiration from a new federal law of 1905 that facilitated the registration and protection of trademarks (Nye 1985: p. 119). One of the largest Barre producers, Boutwell, Milne & Varnum Co., launched its own national campaign in 1912, and then helped the Association launch a broader Barre Granite campaign in 1916. This campaign foundered on apportioning costs during the difficult years of the Great War. Boutwells then remounted its own campaign to promote its Rock of Ages brand in 1919. The more conservative Vermont Marble Company only began advertising in trade journals in 1912, in response to the Barre initiative, and it was only in 1927 that they made a belated entry into national consumer advertising to defend their declining market share.

The Barre Granite campaigns, 1910–1917

In 1910 the Barre Granite Manufacturers Association adopted a trademark and announced its intention to launch an advertising campaign targeting the public and aiming to educate the consumer to request Barre Granite from their local dealers. It was made clear that the wholesale firms would not retail directly to consumers. (Wishart 1911: p. 9). By the summer of 1912 the Manufacturers Association was urging retailers to purchase from a list of their members printed in industry trade journals (Monumental News 1912c: p. 581). The manufacturers also worked with the local Board of Trade to brand Barre as the “Granite Center of the World” through road signs and muslin signs for railway flatcar shipments (Monumental News 1912b: p. 494; 1912d: p. 990; Barre Granite 1917a: p. 3). The branding of the city became a general effort, but the major push to sell Barre Granite would come through the BGMA working with the quarry owners, and through one of the latter operating independently.

Boutwell, Milne & Varnum Co., one of the largest quarry companies, was able to implement a national campaign of its own in 1912. The Hays agency of Burlington devised a three-pronged campaign involving: (1) trademarking Boutwells’ dark Barre Granite with the now century-old logo with the words “Rock of Ages” inside a circle; this trademark was first used on 1 August 1913, and was registered in October (USPTO, TESS, serial number 71073570); (2) an elaborate two-tone advertising booklet entitled The Rock of Ages; and (3) advertising that publication to consumers through national magazines. The flagship magazine for this campaign was the Literary Digest, which had a larger circulation and less original content than the traditional literary magazines, but it was read by a higher income clientele than the truly mass market serials (Lamson Collection 1913).

The self-styled progressives within the Granite Association, including Boutwell, were responsible for hiring H.P. Hinman as Secretary in 1915. Hinman was a devotee of the advertising journal Printer’s Ink, which he devoured cover to cover every week (Hinman 1919: p. 156). The association’s offices were redesigned to facilitate the work of Hinman and a staff of four, who communicated through speaking tubes and desk-top telephones (Hinman 1917: p. 3), and in September 1916 they launched Barre Granite, a monthly in-house bulletin for the member companies (BGMA minutes 1916, 13 September).

Under Hinman’s direction, a national promotional campaign was inaugurated in March 1916, planned by a national rather than a local advertising agency (Granite, Marble and Bronze 1916b: p. 38). Though Taylor-Critchfield-Clague had a New England branch office in Boston, it appears much of the work was done at its Chicago headquarters (Barre Granite 1917b: p. 2). They planned a four-pronged assault: (1) advertising in mass market magazines, (2) circular letters to dealers explaining the campaign and enclosing proofs or reprints of the month’s advertisements, (3) a free promotional publication (similar to Boutwells’ Rock of Ages but touting the theme of the campaign), and (4) a special issue of one of the national trade journals, to pitch the Barre industry in general and to further educate retailers on the advantages to them of the advertising program. The Association’s first circular letter was mailed to 6,000 North American retail monument dealers to explain the magazine blitz that would follow. Then came a proof sheet of the first advertisement in the Saturday Evening Post.

This was not the first use of national advertising in the monument industry, as the Hays agency had advertised the “Rock of Ages” booklet in the Literary Digest, and the trade journal Granite, Marble and Bronze noted that “this was the first of what is known as consumer campaigns in the monument business that has been launched since the days of the consumer campaigns of the Georgia Marble interests and the Winnsboro Granite Corporation” (Granite, Marble and Bronze 1916a: p. 42). In a circular letter to dealers the Association introduced what appears to have been the “most radical departure … in the monument industry”: the manufacturers would advertise nationally but continue selling only through retail dealers (de Carle/Grant fonds 1916).

The campaign was not given a name in the literature, but we can call it, as the advertising agency likely did, the Memorial Masterpieces campaign. This was the title of the lavish, large-format 32-page picture book that constituted the third prong of the publicity effort. The newspaper ads reprinted its soft-focus photographs and expanded on its theme: “to dignify and glorify a worthy industry” (Memorial Masterpieces 1916: p. 2). The first advertisement pictured the mausoleum of Charles Fleishmann (1835–1897), the Cincinnati yeast and vinegar tycoon (Lamson Collection 1916). Memorial Masterpieces dominated the first year of the campaign, but in the second a greater variety of imagery appeared. In August 1917, a proof went out to dealers that was accounted “DIFFERENT” and “dramatic”, though it was similar in many respects to the images traditionally employed in the trade journals to impress the retailers: a view of 300 quarry workers perched on a huge ledge of rock 200 feet long and weighing 69,000,000 pounds. The Association thought it had “real news value” and urged dealers to “HANG IT IN A FRONT WINDOW!” Though unidentified, it was a view of the Boutwell, Milne & Varnum Co. “Rock of Ages” quarry (Lamson Collection 1917). The fourth element of the campaign was a special May 1916 Barre number of American Stone Trade out of Chicago. The prospect of educating 5,100 retail dealers about the advantages of Barre and its product justified the charge of $50 for a double page advertisement in the special number. The real value of course lay in the extensive coverage that counted as news and was therefore cost free (BGMA minutes 1916, 29 April: p. 59).

The four elements of the campaign were mutually supportive. The Barre Association mounted an extensive exhibition of their members’ products at the Cleveland convention of the National Retail Monument Dealers Association, but took the unusual step of advertising the exhibition to the general public in the daily press. They then purchased the cover of the trade journal Granite Marble and Bronze for a reprint of their Cleveland newspaper ad as a demonstration of their efforts to “help the retail dealer sell more”. They claimed that hundreds of “prospects” had attended the Cleveland exhibit, and drew attention of the dealers to their August advertisement in Saturday Evening Post promoting pre-need sale (Granite, Marble and Bronze 1916c).

The collapse of the Barre initiative

A year and a half into the campaign, the Association circulated a dealer questionnaire, asking whether retailers had experienced positive results. The manufacturers’ in-house journal Barre Granite reported that hundreds of replies had been received and that the response was “more encouraging than could have been anticipated by the most sanguine members”. Sample responses were printed, but there was no attempt at statistical analysis, and because over 160 wholesalers supplied the retail dealers, there was no easy way to measure actual increases in sales on the part of those bearing the costs of the program (Barre Granite 1917c: p. 1ff.).

Despite the positive spin put on the campaign by Hinman and his assistants in the monthly issues of Barre Granite, doubts were beginning to infect the membership, and the ability of the quarry owners, in particular, to pay in their assessments was affected by the late entry of America into the World War, in 1917.

The quarry owners encountered serious difficulties with coal prices and the availability of railway cars, and faced having to shut down production. In January 1918 they proposed to the manufacturers that the advertising campaign be eliminated for a few months while they met their obligations (BGMA minutes 1918, 7 January). The manufacturers had faced a 25 percent labor shortage and a 47.5 percent increase in stonecutters’ wages since the...