Marketing a Dream to People Who Have Stopped Dreaming
The specific challenge of introducing a youth development program to low-income Bohol families who have been let down by institutions before, and why earning their trust is a marketing problem unlike any other.
There is no billboard budget. There is no social media ad spend. There is no glossy brochure with smiling children and a toll-free number at the bottom.
What Lerma Moore has instead is a reputation. A face people in Barangay Cambanac already know. A title that carries actual weight inside a real community. And a truth she has to say plainly, over and over, to people who have heard promises before.
Lerma Moore is the General Manager of the Bohol Coconuts Baseball and Softball Club, and she also serves as a Kagawad of Barangay Cambanac. That combination is not an accident. It is, in many ways, the entire strategy.
“You cannot market a youth program to a family that has been burned before by just putting up a tarpaulin. You have to be someone they already know. You have to be someone who already showed up.”
Lerma Moore, General Manager, Bohol Coconuts Baseball & Softball Club & Barangay Cambanac KagawadThis is the central paradox of what the Bohol Coconuts are attempting. The families they most want to reach are precisely the families least likely to trust an unfamiliar institution offering something for their children.
And that is not cynicism. That is lived experience shaped by years of programs that arrived with fanfare and left without explanation.
In low-income barangays across the Philippines, community programs are not a novelty. They appear regularly, usually tied to an election cycle or an NGO funding window. They offer uniforms, meals, certificates.
Then they stop.
Children who invested hope walk away with a lanyard and a lesson: do not invest hope.
That is the invisible wall the Bohol Coconuts face before a single registration form is filled out. It is not a marketing problem in the conventional sense. No amount of clever copy or shareable content dissolves mistrust earned through repetition.
Families in underserved barangays have seen programs come and go. Skepticism is not apathy. It is a rational response to repeated disappointment.
The most effective outreach comes from people already embedded in the community, not from outside organizations announcing themselves.
Trust is not built by a launch event. It is built by months of showing up, listening, and delivering on small promises before asking for bigger ones.
What makes the Bohol Coconuts different, at least in theory, is that Lerma Moore was never an outsider announcing herself. She was already there.
As a sitting Kagawad, she attends the meetings, hears the concerns, and knows the names of families who have fallen through every gap that programs like this are supposed to close.
That proximity is the only marketing advantage the club truly has. And it is considerable.
“The hardest part is not explaining baseball. The hardest part is convincing a mother that this program will still be here next year. That we are not going to disappear after the cameras leave.”
Lerma Moore, General Manager, Bohol Coconuts Baseball & Softball Club & Barangay Cambanac KagawadThe Bohol Coconuts are not selling a product. They are making a case, one conversation at a time, that a child’s future is worth a second round of hope.
That means showing up at purok assemblies. It means answering questions from fathers who want to know if there is a cost. It means being honest when the facilities are still being developed and the full schedule has not yet been set.
Authenticity, in this context, is not a brand value. It is a survival strategy. The moment the club overpromises, it joins a long list of programs that did the same.
Word of mouth from someone already trusted carries more weight than any poster. A Kagawad’s endorsement in a barangay meeting reaches further than an algorithm. These are not romantic notions. They are practical truths about how trust actually travels in communities that have learned to be careful with it.
There is also the small matter of baseball itself being largely unfamiliar to most Bohol families.
This is not a disadvantage. In some ways, it helps. Baseball carries no old baggage in communities where basketball has long been the only option with any infrastructure behind it.
A child who was never the fastest, the tallest, or the most naturally gifted on a basketball court walks onto a baseball field at the same starting line as everyone else. That equality of beginning matters.
“We are not here to find the best athletes. We are here to build good people who happen to learn baseball. The sport is the vehicle. The destination is something much bigger.”
Lerma Moore, General Manager, Bohol Coconuts Baseball & Softball Club & Barangay Cambanac KagawadUnlike basketball in Bohol, baseball arrives with no entrenched hierarchy. Every child begins as a beginner.
The program is framed around youth development. Discipline, teamwork, and consistency are the real curriculum.
The Bohol Coconuts are being designed to belong to Cambanac, not just operate within it. That distinction changes everything.
No one inside the Bohol Coconuts organization pretends this is easy. The club has not yet built its field facilities. The schedule has not yet been set. The launch is still ahead, planned for late June 2026.
But the trust-building has already begun. That is the only part of marketing that cannot be rushed or scheduled.
Every conversation Lerma Moore has in the barangay before the gates open is a brick. Every honest answer to a skeptical father, every moment she does not oversell what the club cannot yet deliver, is another brick.
By the time the Bohol Coconuts formally launch, the goal is that families in Cambanac will already know exactly who they are. Not because of a campaign. Because of a track record, however short, of people who showed up and told the truth.
“We want families to feel like the Bohol Coconuts belong to them. Not like something that came from the outside and asked for their children’s time. It has to feel like theirs from the very first conversation.”
Lerma Moore, General Manager, Bohol Coconuts Baseball & Softball Club & Barangay Cambanac KagawadThere is a particular kind of courage required to dream on behalf of children whose parents have stopped dreaming for themselves. Not because those parents are defeated, but because they have been careful. They have learned what hope costs when it is not backed by anything real.
The Bohol Coconuts are asking for that hope anyway. They are asking for it slowly, personally, and without shortcuts.
Whether that is enough is something only time, and the families of Barangay Cambanac, will decide.
