Talking about the inevitable end every person will face may not be the happiest of topics, it is however important. Everyone is going to die at some point.

SunLife, the Canadian financial services company known primarily as a life insurance company, is bucking the trend and talking about the ‘F’ word – funerals. The company has launched an integrated campaign to accompany its new Guaranteed Funeral Plan.

Using the strapline ‘Let’s talk about the F word,’ SunLife is ridding its communications of the taboo surrounding the topic of funerals, by using pun regarding another forbidden word.

Ian Atkinson, director of marketing at SunLife, says, “Our ‘F word’ campaign aims to bring the topic of funerals to the forefront. As a nation, we need to start talking about what we want when we die, to spare our families more stress and upset at such an emotional time.”

SunLife releases an annual study regarding the costs of funerals. The results for 2018 have revealed that even though on the average £4,000 is spent on a funeral, only 6% of UK’s populations has establish a pre-paid funeral plan. One can understand how small that percentage is, by looking at the percentage of the Netherlands, which reaches up to 70%.

Colin Clark, head of strategy and planning at Five by Five, says, “SunLife is the market leader in over-50 plans, and with that in mind, we wanted to cast that net even wider and cement the brand as the go-to funeral plan provider. Death isn’t exactly a hot topic of conversation. This is uncharted territory and to be successful, we had to go out with something that disrupts the market and draws in a wider audience. SunLife trusted us to take the brand to new places, and hopefully ‘the F Word’ serves as the next step to breaking the taboo.”

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