The Impact of Globalization and Population Mobility on Shifts in Consumer Behavior in the Funeral Industry

The article analyzes how globalization, high population mobility, and digital technologies are reshaping consumer behavior in the funeral industry. The topic gains relevance due to the expansion of remote participation in farewell ceremonies, wider adoption of cremation and memorialization practices not strictly tied to a specific location, the diffusion of environmentally oriented burial formats, and the accelerated “digitization of memory” through digital-legacy management services. Research originality lies in integrating findings on transnational death, online rituals, the digital-afterlife market, and demand for sustainable death care into a unified interpretive framework that explains a shift in consumer choice from body-centered procedures toward the governance of remembrance, biographical traces, and access to the deceased person’s digital data. Special attention is given to online funeral services, digital cemeteries, platform-based memorialization, VR, and media technologies for preserving personal representations, as well as to inequality-related factors shaping families’ preparedness for post-mortem digital traces. The study aims to identify how demand and service-selection logic change under mobile lifestyles. The methodology combines a review of scholarly publications with a comparative interpretation of empirical results. The conclusion outlines implications for funeral providers’ product policy and for ethical and legal agendas in data governance. The article addresses researchers of consumer behavior, service management specialists, and funeral industry practitioners.