Loss of Dignity. Loss of Brand Equity.

This post has a personal perspective since it deals with death. There’s a business side as well, since it deals with a national brand intimately tied to death.

The personal side first. One of my earlier blog posts titled, “Forever Young. A Winning Perspective,” features an image captured in 2010 by photographer Ralph Barrera. The snapshot is of a senior gentleman seriously focused on his golf game with a visible determination to sink his putt. The golfer is tethered to an oxygen tank that stands nearby. The golfer is my dad, César Salas. In October, 1987, he landed his first hole in one. In 2010 his golfing image helped reflect the life of Austin in a year-end recap by the Austin American-Statesman. My dad loved the game of golf. He passed away on Oct. 17, 2011, and he was buried next to my mom in a very traditional manner, but with many personalized wishes written on golf balls neatly tucked near his body.

Now the business side. Preparing for a funeral is extremely emotional and requires the empathy and expertise of a funeral home and its staff. My family used Cook-Walden Funeral Home in Austin. Cook-Walden is part of the Dignity Memorial Service Corporation International. The Dignity brand is far-reaching throughout the U.S. and Canada with a network of more than 1600 funeral, cremation and cemetery providers.

The Dignity corporate brand identity is expressly linked to attributes like caring, respect, integrity, honor, and compassion. It espouses, “a celebration of life with dignity.” These are great brand characteristics, and seem especially relevant for a brand in this industry.

However, identity and image are two different things. Recently, Dignity Memorial may have begun its own discovery of the two terms, and how they may matter to its heavenly positioning with customers on earth.

One day, Arne Swanson, the corporation’s market director, keenly observed a mourning family spreading the ashes of a loved one on a golf course fairway. This spawned his idea for a new product offering that could generate more revenue for the corporation. After all, the funeral business is a business. Maybe his new idea was the result of his compassion and respect, but I wonder.

“I thought, ‘There must be a better way,’” Swanson says, during an interview with NPR. “There just simply was not a product to meet the needs of this family,” he says.

His pursuit of a better way resulted in a memorial golf park, within one of Dignity’s cemetery properties, with a backdrop of the Olympic mountains and an overlook of downtown Seattle. Expect something similar coming soon to a cemetery near you.

The target audience? The passionate golfer who plans his funeral in advance, or the grieving families of deceased golfers who find a golf course setting the ideal resting place for their loved one. When you visit your loved one’s remains, you can bring your putter and brush up on your game. Maybe a tip from heaven will be your reward.

Surely there will be rich debate about whether the concept supports the Dignity brand position. I can make an argument for either side. However, the split between identity and image comes the talking points and the messaging strategy that Dignity Memorial seems to manage loosely. The separation gap of Dignity Memorial’s identity from its image may be as vast as heaven is from hell.

During his radio interview, Swanson fails to hold tightly to the brand’s higher value characteristics of compassion, respect and honor. Rather, for him, this is as funny as it is profitable. He single-handedly reinforces all the negative images of his industry and places them squarely on the Dignity brand. If Dignity promises to begin with compassion, it fails miserably when its market director makes death a laughing matter.

“We guarantee you that everyone here finishes six under,” Swanson says of his great concept.

I can only imagine that Dignity’s green fees for its golfing concept reflect its keen understanding of human emotions during a time of loss.