The most uncomfortable branding brief of all

Hospice New Zealand’s Dying Reviews, developed with McCann Wellington, does something branding normally refuses to do: it drags death into the marketplace of public opinion. Instead of asking whether a company has a “beautiful customer journey,” the platform asks how it behaves when the customer is dying. That shift is more than provocative copywriting. It is a direct attack on the sanitised mythology of modern service design, which loves onboarding and loyalty but rarely wants to discuss the final chapter.

The premise is brutally simple. If businesses can be reviewed for food delivery speed, ride-share politeness, and hotel cleanliness, why not for the way they handle a terminal diagnosis, a final invoice, a hospital discharge, a blocked cancellation, or the dignity of a last interaction? The project forces a taboo into public view: death is not outside branding; it is one of the moments where brand behaviour becomes most revealing. A logo cannot comfort anyone. A policy can. A call centre can. A form can humiliate or it can help.

This is where the project lands its punch. It refuses to let “brand values” remain decorative. If empathy is real, it should survive the hardest scenario a company will ever face. If it does not, then empathy is merely a campaign line. Dying Reviews turns that contradiction into a public test, and the result is both radical and deeply unsettling.

What Dying Reviews actually does

The platform invites people to rate how businesses and organisations treat people at the end of life. That may sound like a niche gesture, but it exposes a vast blind spot in service design. Most businesses already touch death indirectly: banks handle estates, insurers process claims, telecoms terminate lines, utilities manage homes after death, travel companies confront cancellations, and retailers deal with bereaved customers who need practical support, not scripted cheerfulness. Yet almost none of these systems are built to be genuinely humane under pressure.

That is why the project matters as technology as much as communication. It uses the logic of review culture—feedback loops, public ranking, accountability—to challenge institutions that normally hide behind process. In a digital environment where ratings shape reputations, Dying Reviews turns the same mechanism toward moral performance. This is not a consumer convenience score. It is a civic mirror. It asks whether the service interface can hold grief without collapsing into bureaucracy.

The original context is powerful because it does not pretend to solve death. It sets up a platform that makes companies visible to the people who need them most, in a moment when speed and friendliness are not enough. The implication is devastating: if a brand cannot handle dying, then its “customer experience” is incomplete. If it can, the proof should be visible, reviewable, and public.

Why this idea is so necessary

Design culture has spent years glorifying frictionless experiences, but death exposes friction as a moral issue, not a UX flaw. The best work in this territory has often come from palliative care organisations, public-health campaigns, and service designers rather than commercial brands. Think of the way modern hospices use wayfinding, family rooms, memory objects, and quiet domestic interiors to reduce stress without turning illness into spectacle. Or consider projects like Compassionate Frome, which showed how care can be distributed through communities rather than left solely to institutions. Those examples point to a different design ethic: support is not a feature, it is a structure.

Dying Reviews extends that ethic into brand land, where companies frequently mistake polish for responsibility. The project asks a hard question: if a company can optimize a checkout flow but cannot design a decent death-related process, what exactly has it been optimizing? This is especially relevant in technology, where systems are often celebrated for efficiency while remaining emotionally primitive. An algorithm can suppress a fee; it cannot decide whether to call a bereaved customer with tact, clarity, and actual human agency. That gap is precisely where design becomes ethical—or fails.

There is also a political edge here. Death is one of the few universal experiences that still resists full commercial capture. By rating brands on death care, the project challenges the fantasy that everything can be turned into frictionless consumption. It says: no, not everything should be monetized, but everything that touches life’s most vulnerable edge should be accountable.

The danger: when compassion becomes a metric

And yet the project is not free of risk. The moment you create a rating system, you introduce simplification. Grief is not a star score. Dignity cannot be fully quantified. A company may perform brilliantly in one case and fail miserably in another, especially when death intersects with culture, class, language, disability, and family dynamics. If the system becomes too neat, it risks converting sorrow into another consumer dashboard.

This problem is familiar across service design. Health apps reduce well-being to steps, sleep, and mood charts; workplace tools turn burnout into check-ins; airline reviews flatten complex human experiences into averages. Dying Reviews could easily fall into the same trap if its public interface becomes a moral scoreboard rather than a prompt for institutional learning. That would be a tragedy of design: turning care into content.

Some critics will argue that standardizing compassion is impossible and therefore misguided. They are not entirely wrong. End-of-life care depends on nuance, discretion, and context. But the opposite risk is worse: leaving death to opaque systems with no public scrutiny at all. The question is not whether grief can be perfectly measured. It cannot. The question is whether businesses should be allowed to remain unexamined simply because the subject is painful. The answer should be no.

The challenge, then, is not to make death “user-friendly.” It is to make institutions answerable. That means a review system must be designed with care: room for narrative, room for context, room for explanation, and room for non-comparative insight. Otherwise, it becomes the very thing it claims to challenge: a cold interface pretending to be empathy.

What good design would look like here

If brands are ever going to be judged on death care, then the design of the judgment itself matters. The most responsible systems would combine structured ratings with human testimony, allowing people to describe what happened rather than merely score it. A useful model is not the five-star economy but the kind of mixed-format documentation used in civic archives, patient advocacy, and post-incident reviews. Narrative must remain central, because the meaning of care often lies in tone, timing, and presence.

Brands should also be forced to confront the operational details that usually stay hidden. Did the cancellation process work without repeated calls? Was the language on the website respectful? Did the company pause billing when death was disclosed? Did staff know what to say, or did they hide behind scripts? These are not minor service touchpoints. They are the interface of mortality and commerce.

There are precedents in the wider design world for making difficult systems legible. The best information design can transform bureaucratic opacity into public understanding, as seen in public-health dashboards, grief resources, and emergency-response communication. But Dying Reviews adds a sharper edge: it insists that a company’s compassion should be visible before a scandal forces it into the open. That is an uncomfortable standard. It should be.

• Make review categories specific. “Respect,” “clarity,” and “timeliness” are more useful than vague satisfaction scores because they map onto actual end-of-life experiences.
• Allow written context. A short narrative can explain whether the issue was policy, staff training, or a one-off failure, preventing crude moral flattening.
• Separate care from convenience. A company can be efficient and still cruel; the review system should distinguish operational speed from humane practice.
• Use public visibility as pressure. The real power of the platform is not data collection but reputational accountability for institutions that prefer silence.
• Keep the tone solemn, not gamified. Death is not a leaderboard. Any visual language that feels playful would betray the idea.
• Turn criticism into service improvement. Reviews should feed back into training, policy, and communication standards, or the project becomes theatre.

Brands, grief, and the end of the neutral interface

Dying Reviews is a reminder that the most consequential brand moments are often the least glamorous. No campaign line will matter when a family is trying to cancel a subscription after a funeral, or when a terminal patient needs a company to stop sending automated reminders to a person who is no longer alive. These are moments where interface design becomes moral design. They expose whether a brand is a designed system of care or simply a polished machine for extracting attention and money.

That is why the project belongs in a technology conversation, not just a philanthropic one. Technology defines how institutions sort, notify, archive, and respond. If those systems cannot handle death gracefully, then they are not sophisticated; they are merely automated. The future of branding will not be decided only by sustainability claims or AI promises. It will also be judged by how well companies treat the vulnerable, the grieving, and the terminally ill.

In that sense, Hospice New Zealand has done something unusually brave. It has made death a public design brief. It has forced brands to confront the possibility that care can be evaluated, challenged, and improved. But it has also opened a dangerous question: when does accountability become cruelty, and when does the refusal to measure become an excuse for indifference?

Should brands be rated on how they handle death—or does the act of rating inevitably flatten the dignity it seeks to protect?