Shopping from beyond the grave

Imagine receiving a birthday gift from a deceased friend or relative. Not something bequeathed in a will or left in the care of a living acquaintance until the appropriate time, but rather a current gift, recently bought.

It sounds like the premise of a supernatural movie, but it’s actually an emerging trend in the world of commerce. Dubbed “post-death consumerism”, it involves the act of shopping from beyond the grave, facilitated not by hocus-pocus, but technology. And while it sounds decidedly “out there”, consumers are intrigued.

This insight emerged from VML’s annual “Future Shopper Report” for 2024-2025. Researchers surveyed 31,500 shoppers across 20 countries, including South Africa. To qualify respondents had to have shopped online at least once in the preceding month.

In addition to numerous questions about current shopping trends and behaviour, respondents were asked about the future of retail — including whether they would be interested in spending from beyond the grave. Globally, 47% of respondents were keen. But the concept proved even more intriguing for South African respondents, with 51% indicating they would be interested. (The highest interest came from Thailand (74%) and India (70%).)

At first glance, the notion of post-death consumerism may seem purely bizarre. But there’s humanity behind the weirdness.

Consider, for example, a parent who passes away, leaving young children behind. Imagine they could ensure their children would continue to receive a birthday gift from them even after they passed. Something personal and so “them” that they would have chosen it themselves had they been there — bought using their own money and chosen based on data collected about their shopping habits and personality while they were alive.

This idea of bestowing not just a legacy, but a connection to the loved ones you leave behind is an appealing prospect to some.

Of course, all of this is interesting in an abstract, philosophical way, but is it actually feasible? The short answer: yes. Post-death consumerism ties into the broader trend of “grief tech” — a growing field that explores ways to leverage technology like AI to maintain a connection with loved ones who have passed on.

Advances in fields like voice cloning and chatbots are reaching the point where someone who has passed away could be virtually “brought back” in avatar form, allowing living relatives to have a conversation with an AI replica of their deceased loved one. In time to come, people may be able to upload their personality to the cloud before death, so that after they pass away, they can “live on” as an AI.

Rudimentary versions of this technology already exist, and interest is growing. It’s not a big leap to think of teaching a personalised AI to not only interact with loved ones but also shop for them.

Until now, the rules of retail have been based on one very obvious premise: the customer is human. Sure, that’s a broad category and all kinds of demographics come into play, but once you’ve segmented your target customer, the basics of human psychology apply.

In future, brands will likely be marketing and selling to non-human customers as well. These customers could be AIs, bots or personal shopper avatars acting on behalf of consumers.

This is neither far-fetched nor necessarily far off. Algorithms already influence the ads and product recommendations customers receive, based on data collected from their past shopping and browsing behaviour. It’s not a big stretch to think that this same data could be used to train an AI.

And if an internet of things-connected fridge can pick up when the milk is running low and order a new carton autonomously, why should the trusty appliance not be equipped to assess marketing collateral and compare prices to select the brand of milk it deems best?

Enabled by technology, the future of retail is heading into unprecedented territory. Marketers of the future will need to re-think their strategies and become very familiar with algorithms, data science and key word search. The idea of a “ghost in the machine” could soon take on a whole new meaning.

Download the full VML “Future Shopper Report” here.

Hugh Fletcher is global demand content and thought leadership director at VML Enterprise Solutions.

The big take-out: Post-death consumerism ties into the broader trend of “grief tech” — a growing field that explores ways to leverage technology like AI to maintain a connection with loved ones who have passed on.

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