JUNO TALKS with Dirk Haase
The way we die and say goodbye today needs a change and a new culture of mortality. Dirk, CMO of the Ahorn Group, explains how he wants to contribute to this.
You’ve been with the Ahorn Group, the market leader for funerals in Germany, since mid-2024. How did that come about?
I have been in the agency business for 25 years and have been able to work with a wide variety of exciting brands. In recent years, I have been on the management consultancy side and have supported companies in setting up their marketing organisations for the future. I have always been interested in driving a brand forward myself. At Easter last year, the CEO of brand eins, a friend of mine, called me and drew my attention to the vacancy at the Ahorn Group.
Have you thought about it for a long time?
No, not at all. I think the topic of life and death is important and see a great need for change in the way we deal with it. We constantly see content in the media about sport, youth and longevity—in other words, performance and fitness into old age. But when a life comes to an end, we are often unprepared. This is where I would like to change and build something. Today, 20 per cent of Germans—around 17 million people—are over the age of 67. By 2030, this figure will be close to 19 million.
What challenges do you currently face when it comes to saying goodbye and grieving?
The church and the Christian faith are becoming less and less important as traditional points of reference. Religious and cultural backgrounds in Germany are becoming more diverse. Our lives are becoming more digital, more individualised and more mobile. Our families are often spread all over the world. This leads to a kind of vacuum when it comes to saying goodbye. Many are unprepared and only deal with the topic when they leave or shortly before. Quite a few then stand there lost and ask: What do I do now? As the Ahorn Group, we are here to help and offer comfort as well as comprehensive counselling and support in an exceptional emotional situation. I was born in 1971 and was only able to talk to my parents a little about their ideas about life and its finality. My father passed away three years ago and I realised far too late how important such conversations would have been. My mum is 82, and I am increasingly seeking dialogue with her in order to find a common, unifying view of finiteness. With my work, I want to help people open up about such topics.
What ideas do you have on this?
In 2022, for example, we launched the “@dertod_undwir” format on TikTok and Instagram. We now have over 258,200 followers on TikTok and almost 81,100 on Insta. We also have a YouTube channel. Our weekly videos on TikTok reach an average of 1.5 to 1.8 million people.
What do you show there?
For example, how the care of a deceased person is organised. When we collect a deceased person—whether at home or at another location—we take them to our service centre. There they are cared for with reverence. Many people don’t realise how such processes work. Recently, my colleague Charlotte had herself buried alive—from the grave excavation to the burial. It was all filmed. It was an extreme experience for Charlotte. And the many reactions show what an impact we can achieve with it. Because insights like these help people understand the processes and reflect on them.
Do you want to reach out to the younger generation in particular?
Yes, our aim as the Ahorn Group is to anchor the topic of mortality culture more firmly in society again. We want to give more space to death and everything associated with it, because we believe that this is good for society. It’s about breaking down inhibitions and seeing death not just as something terrible, but also as something that unites us. We can see that young people are also interested.
It probably also helps to modernise the image of the undertaker, doesn’t it?
To put it bluntly, we are counsellors, coaches, event managers, confidants and sympathisers all rolled into one. The church used to fulfil these roles, but today it enjoys less and less trust. That’s where we come in. Our profession requires a great deal of empathy, but also organisational talent and clear quality standards. How do we want to say goodbye to a person with dignity and remember them? The need for grief coaching and grief counselling for the entire process is huge and goes far beyond the purely physical burial of a deceased person.
What form of burial do most people choose today?
Around one million people die in Germany every year, 70 to 75 per cent of whom are cremated. Things were different 25 years ago. At that time, burial in a coffin and with a church funeral service were preferred. More emphasis was placed on the ceremony of saying goodbye and the commemoration during and after. Today, especially in the East, many are again looking at lower costs. Many also shy away from time-consuming grave maintenance. However, there are also regional differences and burial laws. Bremen, for example, is the only federal state in Germany that allows the ashes of a deceased person to be buried in their own garden. In Catholic regions, more funerals take place with a church service than in the north or in the new federal states. Home funerals, which we also organise, are almost only found in the south.
Your website states: “With our diversity, we provide the freedom for a personalised farewell”. So you offer every kind of farewell on request, no matter how unusual?
In principle, yes. Our portfolio includes some of the most traditional funeral directors in Germany, such as Grieneisen from Berlin, founded in 1830, which buried members of the Hohenzollern aristocratic family as well as Harald Juhnke. With around 100 companies and over 1,300 employees, we care for every deceased person with the same dignity and the same standards of quality—from celebrities to people without wealth. However, there are differences in our industry. There are probably 6,000 undertakers in Germany. The profession is not protected. In theory, anyone can do it and there are many career changers. Some have emerged from craft businesses or joineries. At the Ahorn Group, we have clear quality standards, are DIN-certified and have also imposed our own guidelines. We position ourselves as a group of companies with high-quality brands and as a quality leader in the market.
What social trends are relevant to you?
Remember Covid-19. People were buried without proper funeral services, or only in a small circle. I had a case in my circle of acquaintances where a father living in New Zealand died and my friend couldn’t fly over for the funeral service. These are irreversible moments. We are therefore starting to create infrastructures so that we can also take part in ceremonies digitally. Or we are building mourning and farewell rooms that are accessible around the clock. The environment is becoming increasingly important for a progressive clientele. There are mushroom coffins that completely decompose a body within around 40 days and transform it into renaturalised soil. We want to demonstrate and advise on such possibilities, as well as the energy balance of burial forms. I have to admit that our 100 companies are still at different levels here.
How digitalised is your industry?
Digitalisation has barely arrived in the funeral industry. However, this is changing and the first purely digital brands are emerging. Overall, funerals are still a local and non-transparent event. People know who buried someone in their family and go to their local town or city when the time comes. But even when it comes to funerals, the journey nowadays increasingly starts with Google. I recently had a death in my family. My cousin and my cousin wanted to bury their mum. My cousin lives in Spain, my cousin lives in southern Germany and my aunt was in Hamburg. It was a challenge for them because they were looking for something emotionally and personally appropriate. Their approach was to do research on Google. If we want to get people to deal with death earlier, we have to pick them up digitally, inform them and accompany them there accordingly. This is where we want to position ourselves clearly as the Ahorn Group and create transparency.
For example, introduce your TikTok viewers to the topic of prevention.
That’s right. If you start making provisions early with a few euros a month, you can afford a dignified and self-determined farewell later on. We are noticing that the number of social burials is increasing and they are really very, very simple. People want to go as self-determined as they have lived. A mid-range funeral costs around 6,000 euros. A significant proportion of this is made up of fees and the cost of the burial site. I can well imagine that the legislator will require funeral provision in the future. We are currently working on a provision planner that gives an initial indication of what a funeral could cost. Our aim is to have completely digital counselling and completion processes.
Why do we read about retirement provision and ETFs every day, but nothing about retirement planning?
People don’t want to deal with the issue and put it off. As a result, many people don’t take out such policies until they are 65 to 70 years old. Death benefit insurance also sounds uncool at first. But I can imagine that young people today are more open-minded. Some are already familiar with investing money via an app and understand the sense of this type of provision. And also quite self-critically: in my opinion, we don’t yet have the right, contemporary product offerings for the younger generations.
Let’s look to the future. What can we expect when it comes to farewells and the culture of remembrance?
The topic of digital legacy will become a major issue. What will happen to my data and social media profiles? How do I want to be remembered digitally? Who has access? It is possible to imagine a person “living on” virtually with the help of AI. You can visit a virtual room, hear this person’s voice and remember their life in the form of images, films, texts or even their biography. We took over the “Life and Death” exhibition some time ago. Twice a year, we discuss new possibilities with hospices, retirement homes, carers, doctors, palliative care specialists and many more.
Let’s talk about the brand. As a brand strategist, how do you view your new job?
In general, I am fascinated by brands where the brand is at the core of a company and influences all areas—be it pricing, product portfolio, product development, personnel or organisational development. The Ahorn Group now consists of 100 individual funeral homes—including larger ones such as TrauerHilfe Denk in Munich and Bavaria with over 80 branches. Strictly speaking, we are therefore on the market with 100 different brands. The Ahorn Group itself is purely a holding and corporate brand. Setting up a clear, nationwide brand strategy for this construct was a high priority for me at the beginning. M&A is another important topic, as is the integration of new companies into the Group and the standardisation of our high quality across all of our current individual brands and across the entire analogue-digital customer journey.
From the outside, customers might think that your brands have nothing to do with each other. I assume they all have their own branding and are probably only known locally or regionally?
Yes, that’s how it is. Of course, everyone has the same high quality standards. We also take a very close look at which companies we take on and have a strict selection process. But yes, the topic of brand architecture is just as important to me as working on a new, contemporary brand image. Strategically, I want to move away from the classic funeral director image in people’s minds and towards a modern platform for a culture of mortality that prepares people well in advance, advises them and offers customised solutions. So that people can say goodbye and remember each other in the same way they have lived and would like to.