Businesses have designed products, services, and customer experiences for every significant life phase. Education. First jobs. Marriage. Home ownership. Pregnancy. Divorce. Retirement. There is one phase that almost every living person will eventually reach, and that virtually no business has ever deliberately designed for. Dying. Hospice New Zealand and McCann Wellington identified that gap, and built a review platform to make it visible.
The Problem
One in five New Zealanders is impacted by dying at any given time, either living with a terminal illness or actively supporting someone who is. Despite medical advances extending the length of life, dying has become increasingly out of sight and out of mind in institutional and commercial design. The result is a population of people in their most difficult period navigating systems that were never built with them in mind.
Banks that will not adjust loan terms for someone who has months to live. Insurance companies with cancellation policies that require paperwork, terminally ill people do not have the energy to complete. Telcos whose processes for ending a contract are complex enough to constitute a burden on a healthy person. Airlines that do not accommodate medical needs. Schools, pharmacies, supermarkets, and churches: every institution a person interacts with in daily life becomes harder to navigate when they are dying, and almost none of them know it because the people experiencing the difficulty are not in a position to tell them in any format that institutions respond to.
The Platform
Dying Reviews, built by McCann Wellington in partnership with Hospice New Zealand, research agency Perceptive, PR agencies GRC Partners and Porter Novelli, and marketing technology consultancy Credera, is a live review platform at DyingReviews.org where terminally ill people can rate and review how they are being treated by the organisations they interact with.
The format is deliberate. Reviews and ratings are the language businesses already respond to. Star ratings on Google, Trustpilot scores, Net Promoter data. The platform translates the experience of dying into the data format that corporate customer experience teams already know how to read and act on. It is not a charity campaign asking for empathy. It is a structured feedback mechanism asking for design improvement.
The initial 500 reviews were gathered through Hospice channels and research partners. The platform was specifically designed to respect the time and energy of those completing reviews, recognising that every minute spent on the platform is a minute taken from a finite remaining supply. The reviews reveal systematic pain points across categories and include clear guidelines for organisations looking to improve their empathetic design practices.
What the Reviews Show
The systemic nature of the problem is the platform’s most commercially significant finding. These are not isolated bad experiences with individual customer service representatives. There are structural gaps in how entire categories of business have been designed. The pain points recur across banks, insurers, telcos, and government institutions in patterns consistent enough to constitute design failures rather than service exceptions.
Brigid Alkema, Chief Creative Officer at McCann Wellington, described the platform’s commercial argument: “For businesses, Dying Reviews speaks in a language they understand: data. They can now see how they’re performing at a human level, track it over time, and make informed decisions about where empathy and better design can improve customer experience and, more importantly, human dignity. This isn’t about charity. It is about smart businesses recognising an opportunity to lead on something that matters.”
Wayne Naylor, CEO of Hospice New Zealand, framed the opportunity more broadly: “Dying Reviews has the potential to drive innovation for a phase of life we are all likely to go through. Until now, we haven’t been able to have conversations with many businesses and organisations about how they can improve their experiences for terminally ill people and their families. This platform is opening those conversations in a way that gets their attention and drives real change.”
Early Outcomes
Major banks have already begun engaging directly with Hospice New Zealand to understand how they can improve their processes for terminally ill customers and their families, a response that validates the platform’s commercial framing. The review data is doing what Hospice’s previous advocacy could not: generating the kind of organisational attention that produces institutional change.
The next Dying Reviews Report will be released later in 2026 behind a paywall, giving businesses access to deeper analytical insight into the data while creating a sustainable income stream for Hospice New Zealand. The learnings that were previously lost when people died, the specific friction points they experienced, and the things that could have been done differently will now be captured, reported, and available to every organisation willing to use them.
The Cannes Recognition
The campaign has been shortlisted for the Glass Lion at Cannes Lions 2026, one of the festival’s most prestigious individual awards, given to work that drives cultural change through challenging gender inequality and social norms. The shortlisting confirms the industry’s recognition that Dying Reviews is not primarily a communications campaign. It is a structural intervention in how businesses relate to one of the most underserved populations in customer experience design.
Campaign Name: Dying Reviews
Agency Name: McCann Wellington / PR: GRC Partners + Porter Novelli / Research: Perceptive / Marketing Technology: Credera
Brand Name: Hospice New Zealand
Location: New Zealand (platform live globally at DyingReviews.org)
