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Built as investment, marketed as care
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Are you selling care, or are you selling investment? That’s the question I ask almost anytime I’m walking a camp property with a camp exec, director or owner. So many times, folks don’t quite know how to answer when it’s put this way. But the question raises something we see over and over in this amazing field. A lot of camps are already doing the work of investment. They’re just marketing it like care. Let me define the difference. Care means “watch my kid.” A parent looking for care is going to pick the most affordable option. One that makes sense for their family. Here convenience + price wins. Investment means “this will help my child grow.” A parent looking through the lens of investment will pay whatever they can afford because the result matters. Here is where the outcome wins. If you’re a camp doing real youth development, you are building investment-level work. The programs. The curriculum. The staff training. The skill progression. That is all investment work. But where so many camps lose the thread is in how they market that work. An example that applies to many camps: You offer swim lessons. Kids get in the pool, learn with certified instructors, maybe even get handwritten report card-style updates for parents at the end of the week. All the strokes and skills the kid learned and worked on. The progress they made. That’s amazing stuff. But then the camp website is just a picture of the pool on the activities page with some blurb about swimming twice a day and some lessons. The report card should be all over the website. It’s as important as the pool itself when we are thinking of marketing as investment. A pool is an amenity. The investment version is: your kid will become a swimmer using our five-step progression. A report card that says “your kid started here and is now here” is an investment. That is the version parents will stretch to pay for and feel great about doing it. It’s the same thing with communication during the week. Camps would do well to have that part of the business catch up to pricing. If I’m paying over a thousand dollars a week for a day camp, I want updates on my kid. Plain and simple. I want to know what skills they’re gaining. I want to know the staff are watching them. Anyone with kids in school knows you get notified a million times a day. If I’m not hearing from the camp while my kid is there, there’s a gap in the investment story the parent is paying for all stemming from what they are used to in other areas. Parents aren’t camp discount shopping. They’re working and stretching for the best their family can afford. And the investment is why they’re doing it. Which brings me back to the thing I said up top. The field is youth development. The best part about camp is that we get the privilege of developing humans. If you’re already thinking that way, you are already thinking like an investment. You just haven’t flipped it over to the marketing side, yet. The facility is already set to go. The curriculum is already written. Your staff is already running it every week of the summer. The job this fall is naming it and putting it in front of parents. Sincerely, Senior Consultant at Immersive1st Learn more about Immersive1st's Approach |
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