Every purchase carries some cost to walk away from if it turns out to be wrong. A bad loaf of bread costs three dollars, and you barely think twice about it. A car is a different story. If it turns out to be the wrong one, walking away might cost ten thousand dollars, so you think harder before you buy it in the first place.

Choosing a school lands much closer to the car end of that scale, except the cost isn't only financial. It means disrupted friendships, lost momentum, and a student who has to start over somewhere new.

I heard this framed exactly that way on the latest episode of the Independent School Moonshot Podcast, The Future of Independent School Marketing, recently with Simon Jones, founder of the Bonjour Agency.

He calls it escape cost, and it changed how I think about what a school's marketing is actually supposed to do.

The Real Question Families Are Asking

Families feel escape cost before they ever pick up the phone. Simon's point is that it's never been higher, because families now have more information than ever, which sounds like it should make the decision easier. Instead, it often makes them more anxious that they're missing something, or that another school down the road might have been the better call.

Most school marketing is built to answer a different question. It's built to make the case for choosing you by pointing to better teachers, better outcomes, and a stronger community. All of that matters, but none of it touches the fear families are sitting with: the fear of getting this decision wrong and paying for it later.

That's a different problem to solve than why us. It's closer to answering whether a family can trust this choice will still feel right two or three years from now.

What Trust-Building Marketing Actually Looks Like

It might look like being honest about who your school isn't the right fit for, so families choose with more confidence instead of less.

It might mean showing what happens to families two or three years after they enroll, not just the testimonial from the first open house.

It might mean giving current families language to use when another parent in a Facebook group asks if they made the right call, because that conversation is happening whether your school is part of it or not.

Simon doesn't see this as one tactic among many. He thinks this kind of trust-building is where school marketing is headed overall, as families lean more on each other and less on whatever a school says about itself.

Why This Belongs in the Business Model Conversation, Not Just the Marketing Plan

It's tempting to treat this as a marketing team problem. It isn't. Escape cost sits at the intersection of enrollment, retention, and how a school talks about its own value, which means it's a business model question before it's a messaging question. If leadership doesn't have a shared, honest view of who the school truly serves best, marketing will keep defaulting to why us instead of the harder, more useful why not you. That kind of clarity is exactly what I work through with school leadership teams during a Business Model Retreat, before a single word of marketing copy gets written.

Two Things to Try This Week

Ask your admissions team what they currently do to reduce a family's fear of being wrong, separate from anything that makes the case for being right. If the honest answer is nothing, that's a real conversation worth having.

Then look at your last few pieces of marketing content and ask whether they're aimed at convincing someone to say yes, or at helping someone feel safe saying yes.

The full episode, The Future of Independent School Marketing, is live now. Simon and I get into a lot more than escape cost, including why trying to look strong everywhere your competitor is strong usually backfires, and where he thinks AI has a real role in school marketing versus where it's just noise.