A good friend said that to me the other day. At a homeschool kids’ craft fair of all places (speaking of weird, but the irony was lost).
Anyway, he said it. And more importantly, he meant it.
Next day I was about to take my kid to a Camp Open House. Her first summer at sleepaway camp (Hey Elise! Hey Camp Johnsonburg!). Oldest goes to camp too. (Hey Laura! Hey Stomping Ground!)
We were at a rec basketball game, and another parent, said her own version of “Camp is weird” when I told her about it. Except her version spoke to another group of voices:
“You’re lucky you know the people there and can trust them. Heard too many horror stories.”
And then there was this in the K&E Slack about talking to families about camp.
“It’s often the mom went to camp and loved it and dad wasn’t a camp kid and doesn’t ‘get it’”
Thought about these three interactions quite a bit.
Came to three conclusions:
Parents think camp is weird
Parents think something bad will happen at camp
Parents can’t be sold on transformations and benefits on their own.
This is a big uphill climb (and we haven’t even gotten to price).
Optimal Newness or MAYA
In David Epstein’s Inside the Box, about how constraints breed creativity, there’s a section on Optimal Newness, or MAYA (Most Advanced Yet Acceptable) framing.
To accept a new concept, it has to butt up damn close to something that’s already common and fully understood.
→ Light bulb lamps with lampshades because that’s what gas lamps needed
→ Electric cars with charging adaptors where the gas tanks are in regular gas guzzlers
→ Shakespeare taking stories people already half-knew and turning them into an event for the working class
Camps, by and large, need to stop thinking of themselves as a tangential product to a childhood experience or a convenient add-on to the summer calendar.
Because for the CaMp is WeIrD or I DoN’T TrUsT YoU crowd you aren’t selling them a quaint couple of weeks in the woods. You are literally moving them from gas to electric (or solar!). It’s a full system switch.
The way to bring people into the fold on a new or different idea isn’t to sit there and list out all the cool shit about it and hope they start nodding their heads.
No, the way to do it is to start by speaking in the most acceptable language possible about a greater philosophy and then essentially tack on camp at the end.
For the camp-loving super freaks out there? None of this matters really. They are into it.
But I’m talking the roughly gajillion (real number) of parents out there who are in the “Camp is weird. Hell no” category. That’s the real blue ocean. Because honestly, that’s most families out there.
Does the camp industry need to get everyone in that group from Hell No → Probably Yes → Here’s My Deposit?
No. Of course not.
But like 1%? 5%? That kind of move would shift the convo into things like “Um, maybe we should turn this golf course into a summer camp.”
Hey, it's Jack again.
Doug & I spent about 10 hours creating and planning K&E's full year of email content. Newsletters, sales sequences, messaging themes, all of it.
We put together a free version of it for you to copy if you want.
Okay Doug You Very Handsome And Smart Guy (*Blushes*), How Do We Do This?
Not easily. But there is a place to start.
As counterintuitive as it sounds, resist the urge to overexplain why camp is good at the stuff you already know it’s good at.
Those concepts have to be universally accepted and not just seem exclusive to camp.
Kids need friendships to thrive. Friendships take time and conversation and shared experience and fun and some disagreement and more time. That’s just how friendship works.
Do we all agree on that? Great. Everyone is nodding their heads. I almost want to leave you right there.
Consider there was once a time when having a gym membership was “weird”. Reserved for the muscle-bound Schwarzenegger types.
Same with therapy. Seeing a shrink was taboo, secretive, and a sign you might “have something wrong with you.” Tony Soprano helped speed that along by getting in touch with his mommy issues, and now nobody blinks about it.
Think about how these places are now positioned.
Gyms don’t sell “A Room With Treadmills.”
They sell energy, health, control, confidence, identity, and a solution to sitting on your ass all day.
Therapy doesn’t sell “you’re mentally ill, so you need help.”
It’s much more like everyone needs help processing life, stress, grief, anxiety and change. We have just the place for that.
Millions of families understand similar ideas about summer camp. Millions and millions more don’t.
Camp is weird to people when there is no defining category for it.
So was sending a toddler to preschool.
So was turning your garage into a home office.
Weird things become normal when the need is overwhelmingly obvious, and the language becomes plain-as-day familiar.
So when someone says to me, camp is weird (or I can see it in their eyes), the answer isn’t to fight weird fire with weirder fire. It’s to say “Yeah I guess. You know what I’ve been thinking about? How we need to give kids practice growing up. So they aren’t weird later.”
Camp IS weird. To some people.
But it won’t be once we talk about the rest of the world around it.
(Borrow from Jack) You got this,
Doug
PS - Thoughts on this? Email me at doug@thesummercampsociety.com
Remember, Write From Camp is publishing 3x/ week and free on Fridays.
