Organic, Inc.: Camp Organic

The Camp Organic Experience

At Organic, “immersive experience” is neither digital talk nor marketing-speak. It’s real life, and at the root of our culture. All employees attend our intensive marketing boot camp—Camp Organic—where they build strong team relationships, learn how to conduct ethnographic research and find the key consumer insight—the “gift”—that can lead to a marketing breakthrough, all while learning what they’re really made of.

Several times a year, 40 employees from five cities gather in Las Vegas and are divided into seven teams. They’re given a 36-hour assignment: come up with a marketing campaign idea for a fictional product targeted to a specific persona.

Each team is also assigned one of the seven sins—greed, pride, lust, anger, etc.—as the emotional theme that frames their research. The teams are made up of people from diverse disciplines. They combine their points of view with the learnings gleaned from direct interaction with their target on the streets of Las Vegas to come up with The Big Idea.

Camp O is like a marketing reality show: upbeat, competitive, fast-paced, and sleep-depriving. While team members learn first-hand about customer empathy and how that illuminates the business of marketing, they also learn a lot about themselves—how insightful they can be, how far they can stretch their skills and talents. It cements the core values of the Organic culture, that out of collaboration between diverse perceptions comes new, better and different thinking. It energizes employees, who return to their offices with a renewed attitude (although exhausted and often hungover), bringing their best selves back to the workplace.