I am not a camp person.

That’s what I’d tell you if you asked. And that’s likely because it’s what I tell myself. Show me the archetypal image of a camper, be it the outdoorsy type or the wide-brimmed hats, the color wars, the lanyard braiding, the s’mores by the fire summer camper, and I’d say with complete sincerity, “That is not me.” That has never been this Detroit kid. Camp? Not my identity. Except, however, I went to church camp every year growing up. I spent my tween summers at Blue Lake Fine Arts Camp in western Michigan. I attended swim camp with my brother, Eugene. And now, as a grown man with my own family, I return every year to the University of Michigan’s family camp, Camp Michigania, where my children are making the kinds of memories I once did.

I’ve been camping my entire life; I just never thought about myself as a “camper.” I never claimed the moniker because I never saw myself reflected in the identity camp projected. The mirror the industry holds up didn’t show my face, so I looked elsewhere when I thought about who I was and how I moved throughout the world — even as I kept returning, year after year, to camp. I find this gap between my lived experience and my cultural identity both personally interesting and strategically urgent. And I think it is the most important conversation the camp industry needs to have right now.

When the Mirror Doesn’t Reflect

The most powerful driver of human behavior is not information, price, or even product quality. It’s culture, which is anchored in our identity. We don’t simply choose products and experiences because of what they are; we choose them because of who we are, the reflections of ourselves. We choose the brands and branded products that are congruent with how we see ourselves and how we want to be seen by others.

This is not a soft observation. It’s grounded in decades of scholarship across sociology, psychology, anthropology, and consumer research. When a category’s perceived identity — its images, language, archetypes, and cultural shorthand — is incongruent with how a person sees themself, they disengage. Not because the offering has nothing to give them or because they wouldn’t love it or grow from it or send their children back every summer for a decade, but because the story being told isn’t their story. And people don’t choose stories in which they cannot see themselves.

This is precisely the challenge facing camp as a category. And I want to name it directly, with both honesty and deep respect, because I genuinely love what camp does for people. The challenge is this: the dominant cultural identity of camp — the image, the language, and the archetype that the category has historically projected — is leaving an enormous number of potential families, children, and advocates on the outside looking in. It’s not that they wouldn’t thrive in a camp environment; rather, it’s that the industry’s communication fails to say to them, “This is for you too.”

I was one of those people. I am still one of those people in a meaningful sense. And if someone like me, someone who has camped his entire life, doesn’t identify with the category, then the category has a relevance problem that goes far deeper than any individual camp’s enrollment numbers.

The Danger of Reducing Camp to an Activity

Here is where the stakes get real. When a category fails to articulate its deeper cultural significance, it gets flattened. It gets reduced to its most functional, most commodified, most easily replaceable description. For camp, that description increasingly sounds like this: “a place for kids to stay busy and have fun during the summer.” I understand how that happens. It is the path of least resistance in marketing. Lead with the tangible. Lead with the concrete. Tell people what you do, where you are, what activities you offer, and how many weeks you run. These are the things that are easy to communicate and to compare. They are also, almost by definition, the things that make you most vulnerable to competition.

Consider this: if camp is primarily a place for kids to stay busy during the summer, then it is also competing against every other thing that keeps kids busy during the summer.  Travel sports. Academic enrichment programs. Summer school. Coding bootcamps. The extraordinary pull of screens that are increasingly designed to occupy every available hour of a young person’s attention. The list goes on. Against that competitive field, camp is just one option among many. And it is an option that, for many families, comes with a perception problem. It feels like something from another era. Something for a particular kind of kid from a particular kind of family. Something that, if we are being honest, still carries a cultural image that does not reflect the full diversity and complexity of the families who are actually making decisions about their children’s summers today.

Camps might be full right now. Waitlists exist. Returning families are loyal. Even my wife sets her alarm for 6:45 a.m. so she can register our girls for camp before the spots fill up. It’s almost as difficult as trying to score Beyoncé tickets. On the surface, my provocation might seem unfounded, and I certainly don’t want to manufacture a crisis that is not yet visible. But the question worth asking is not whether camp is doing well today. The question is whether camp is building the kind of cultural relevance that will sustain it tomorrow. Whether it is speaking to the families who are not yet in the fold or planting the seeds of identity and belonging that will make the next generation of parents think of camp as something that is unquestionably, obviously, personally for them when they are choosing experiences for their children. If the answer to that question is uncertain, then the work is urgent. Because categories don’t collapse all at once; they erode gradually, one family at a time, as the cultural story they tell becomes increasingly less resonant with the people who have the most potential to love them.

Parity Is the Default; Culture Is the Distinction

Here is something I have observed consistently across my years in brand strategy and academic research: most products and services are functionally equivalent in the eyes of the people choosing between them. They are undifferentiated shades of gray that separate one product from another. Similarly, the differences between one camp’s programming and another’s, between one summer experience and another, are real but rarely decisive. But the stories we tell ourselves and each other are distinct. The feeling. The sense of whether this place — this community and this experience — is for someone like us. That’s why the most powerful brands in the world don’t compete on features. They compete on meaning. They compete on cultural significance. They ask not what our product does, but what our product means. Not who uses us, but who we are for. Not what makes us different from our competitors, but what we stand for that no competitor can replicate.

For camp, the answer to that last question is rich and real — and worth everything. Camp isn’t a summer program. Camp is a container for transformation. It is one of the last remaining spaces in modern life where young people can be fully present, fully themselves, fully immersed in a community of peers who are not performing for an algorithm or curating a feed or navigating the invisible social hierarchies of the school year. Camp is where identity forms, where resilience is built, where the self is discovered in ways that the ordinary rhythms of contemporary childhood rarely allow. Camp is where children learn that they are capable, that they belong, and that they are seen. That is not a feature; that’s an enormously powerful cultural proposition. One that I’d be the first to sign my kids up for.

This is the driver with which camp as an industry must lead. This is more than just the marketing of camp; it’s the understanding of itself. The question is not whether camp has something meaningful to offer, because it obviously does. The question is whether the people who most need to hear that story are actually hearing it. Whether the families who would love camp, who would be transformed by camp, who would become the most passionate advocates for camp are recognizing themselves in the story camp is telling. My going to Camp Michigania with my family wasn’t a result of the marketing, but because my friend — someone like me — insisted that I’d love it. And I did, because my friend tailored the story for me, essentially rebranding my understanding of camp.

The Rebrand Is Not About a New Logo. It Is About a New Mirror

When I say camp needs a rebrand, I want to be precise about what I mean. I’m not talking about updating visual identities or refreshing websites, though those things may be part of the work. I’m talking about something more fundamental and more difficult. I’m talking about expanding the cultural identity of camp and its meaning as a category so that it reflects the full range of people whose lives it has the power to change. This is a growth strategy. It is customer centricity in its most practical and most consequential form. It requires asking, with genuine curiosity and real humility, “Who else is this for? Who is not seeing themselves in our story, and what would it take to tell that story in a way they could actually hear?”

For individual camps, this means telling transformation stories, not sharing activity lists. It means showing the full humanity of the camp community, not just its most conventionally recognizable face. It means speaking to parents, the actual decision-makers, in language that connects to their deepest aspirations for their children and their hunger for experiences that build real character in a world that seems increasingly designed to undermine it. And it means understanding that the most powerful marketing for a culturally significant experience is not the marketing the organization produces. It’s the stories the community tells on its own behalf. The parent who posts about a child who came home from camp different in the best possible way. The alumnus who, without being asked, says that camp changed their life. The person who, like me, doesn’t identify as a prototypical camper but keeps returning to camp because something about it is irreplaceable. With your help, we can eventually find the words to explain why.

I never thought of myself as a camp person. But camp has been one of the most consistent and formative cultural presences of my entire life. That is the story worth telling. Not because it is my story specifically, but because it is the story of countless people who are currently invisible to the camp category’s sense of itself. Find those people. Tell their stories. Hold up a wider mirror. Say clearly, credibly, and with genuine cultural fluency to everyone who has never seen their reflection in the category, “Camp is for you too.” Because it is. It always has been. We just haven’t said so in a way they could hear — present company included.

Marcus Collins, PhD, is a cultural translator, award-winning marketer, and professor at the Ross School of Business, University of Michigan. He is the bestselling author of For The Culture and the co-host of the FROM THE CULTURE podcast.