The Final Taxi

Over the past two decades, the use of increasingly explicit sexual appeals in consumer-oriented print advertising has become almost commonplace. Sexuality is considered one of the most powerful tools of marketing and particularly advertising. Post-advertising sales response studies have shown it can be very effective for attracting immediate interest, holding that interest, and, in the context of that interest, introducing a product that somehow correlates with that interest.

So what is the correlation between lingerie models and caskets?

“Coffins are consumer goods like any other things, so I sell in the same way as any other consumer goods are sold.” says  Maurizio Matteucci, owner of the Cofanifunebri undertakers in Rome, Italy.

What Matteucci has done is to produce a calendar that shows women in sexy underwear posing with his coffins. Pictures of 12 pouting women showing off the caskets are on the firm’s website.

He said: “The calendar is very popular. It is good marketing but it is also but also a way to play down such a serious subject and to smile.”

On the other side of the scale the new 2008 Men of Mortuaries calendar is out now. This is a spin-off of the traditional “hunks” calendars, it features funeral directors and morticians from across the country. I had wrote about them in an earlier blog.