Woodlawn Cemetery is without question one of my favorite places. I visit Woodlawn on a semi-regular basis, and always find it first of all flat-out beautiful, and second a great source of inner tranquility. It says much about me, I suppose, that I'm more comfortable around dead people (or monuments to dead people, anyway) than I am around the living. But that's the way it is.

So it was with much chagrin that I received Woodlawn's most recent marketing material, highlighting their new "Garden Conservatory Mausoleum." While I love the place, their marketing people have managed to turn out an incredibly dubious piece of propaganda. It can't be an easy thing to market a cemetery (even when, as we all know, people are dying to get in). But surely a better effort could have been made than this.

The following few pages will take you step by step through their collateral, highlighting points that seemed particularly egregious to me. Please note that I love Woodlawn, and have no desire to be banned from the place for life (or even longer than that). In providing this constructive deconstruction of Woodlawn's effort, I hope to help those managing garden cemeteries to hone their messages, and avoid blunders that, apparently, prove all too easily made.