Due to our sheer numbers (and our self-absorption) Baby Boomers have always been a huge influence on American culture. Faced with a group this big, this affluent and this self-indulgent, marketers have always found ways to give us what we want. This is true of clothes (yesterday it was bell bottoms, today it’s Dockers), of music (we’ve gone from the Herman’s Hermits to Sting; I leave it to you to decide if that’s progress or not) and just about anything else you can think of – and also of things that probably never crossed your mind.

Things like caskets.

This job requires me to spend hours online doing research (and by research, I mean of course looking for photos of Scarlett Johansson). But the other day I stumbled across something that struck even me as weird (and I can remember when Jimi Hendrix opened for the Monkees). Eternal Image, or EI as they refer to themselves, sells stuff for dead people. Well, not so much stuff for dead people, as dead people don’t really need a lot, materially speaking. EI sells stuff for containing dead people. In other words, funerary products. In other other words, caskets and urns.

Okay, so caskets and such aren’t in themselves so strange. But what struck me as curious was the way EI is marketing their wares. According to their site, “There are 75 million Baby Boomers in the U.S. alone. As a generation they are used to getting not only what they need, but what they want – and what they want are brands.”

In plain English, EI is betting that when they shuffle off this mortal coil, lots of Boomers aren’t going to settle for a simple pine box. No, EI is assuming that the same folks who look like a walking stock car will want the same thing at the end of life that they did during life. And EI is going to give it to them.

They’re doing this through branding. As EI says on their website, “Our mission is to give people the freedom to reflect the passions of their lives in a meaningful, tasteful way.”

So, if you’re Catholic, your loved ones can store your ashes in an urn licensed by the Vatican Library Collection. Or if you’re a dog person, you can get planted in a casket licensed by the American Kennel Club (better hope Fido doesn’t like to dig up bones!)

But the oddest of their meaningful and tasteful offerings is a line of Star Trek funerary products. Now, adjectives like meaningful and tasteful aren’t the first ones that spring to mind when I think of Star Trek. Quoting again from their site, “After ten movies and five television series, phrases like “Live long and prosper,” “Resistance is futile” and “Space: the final frontier” have become part of our global vocabulary.”

Oddly, they left out the most relevant Star Trek quote: “He’s dead, Jim.”

Go figure.