Death in a Consumer Culture
Routledge Interpretive Marketing Research Series

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.

Preface Part I: The Death Industry 1. Proclaiming Modernity in the Monument Trade: Barre Granite, Vermont Marble and national advertising, 1910-1932 2. The Marketing of a Siege: Leningrad vs. Sarajevo- memorializing death and despair 3. Marketing Death through Erotic Art 4. Authenticity, Informality and Privacy in Contemporary New Zealand Post-Mortem Practices 5. Custody of the Corpse: Controlling alkaline hydrolysis in US death care marketsPart II: Death Rituals and Consumption 6. Death, Ritual and Consumption in Thailand: Insights from The Pee Ta Kohn Hungry Ghost Festival 7. Ritual, Mythology, and Consumption After a Celebrity Death 8. Voluntary Simplicity in the Final Rite of Passage: Death Part III: Consumption of Death 9. Cheating Death via Social Self Immortalization: The potential of consumption-laden online memorialization to extend and link selves beyond (physical) death 10. Extending the Mourning, Funeral, and Memorialization Consumption Practices to the Human-Pet Relationship 11. Great Granny Lives On: pursuing immortality through family history Research 12. Physician Assisted Suicide At The Crossroads Of Vulnerability And Social Taboo: Is death becoming A consumption good? 13. Dispatches from the Dying: Pathographies as a lens on consumption in extremisPart IV: Death and the Body 14. The Role of Body Disposition in Making Sense of Life and Death 15. Consumer Acceptance of Radical Alternatives to Human Disposal: An examination of the Belgian marketplace 16. Theatre of the Abject: Body worlds and the transformation of the cadaver Part V: Alternate Endings 17. The Mortal Coil and the Political Economy of Death: A critical engagement with Baudrillard 18. The Spectre of Posthumanism in Technology Consumption: The death of the human? 19. Poetically Considering Death and Its Consumption 20. Death: Where do we go from here?

Susan Dobscha is Professor of Marketing at Bentley University in Waltham, USA. She explores gender issues in marketing, particularly in the context of the Filene's Basement Bridal Event; consumer resistance to marketing tactics; and the role of consumption in a woman's transition into first-time motherhood. She has also studied sustainability issues related to consumer culture. She has written articles for Harvard Business Review, Journal of Public Policy and Marketing, Journal of Macromarketing, Consumption, Markets, and Culture, Marketing Education Review, Advances in Consumer Research, Developments in Marketing Science, and Advertising and Society Review, and has presented her work at numerous conferences. She recently co-chaired the 9th ACR Conference on Gender, Marketing, and Consumer Behavior.