WRITTEN BY: ALISON JOSHI, DIRECTOR OF JWJ DESIGN
If you’ve ever mapped out your customer journey, it probably looked something like this: Awareness, Consideration, Evaluation, Decision, Experience & Share. Five neat stages, one after the other, ending in a booking and a nice review.
It’s a useful model but I think we know this doesn’t truly represent the journey a potential visitor to your farm park actually goes on.
What the journey probably looks like in reality
Picture a parent scrolling Instagram on a Tuesday evening. They see a friend’s photo from your farm, that’s awareness. They tap through to your profile, then your website, checking opening times — consideration. They get distracted by their child and don’t think about it again for a week.
The following weekend, the kids talk about their favourite animals and mum remembers your farm park, but can’t quite remember the name. Back to Google: “farm park near me.” Awareness again. She lands on TripAdvisor to check it’s worth the drive — consideration again. She compares your event calendar with a rival attraction’s — evaluation. She almost books, then checks with her partner about which Saturday works — back to planning. Five days later, she finally buys tickets — decision, at last, on maybe her fourth, fifth, even eighth touchpoint.
That’s not a simple one direction funnel. That’s a loop, with detours, dead ends, and re-entries. Google, YouTube, Instagram, review sites, blog posts, even ChatGPT recommendations for “things to do with kids aged 5-8”, customers dip in and out of these constantly, often circling back to stages they’d technically already passed.
Why this matters more than ever
A few years ago, the journey was shorter and the touchpoints were fewer: see a poster, visit the website, book. Now there might be eight or nine moments of contact before someone commits, spread across weeks, across devices, across platforms you don’t fully control.
The practical upshot for farm attraction owners is you don’t get to choose which touchpoint is the “important” one, because you don’t know which one will be the deciding moment for any given visitor. It might be your website. It might be a two-second glance at your Instagram grid. It might be the tone of a confirmation email, or a friend’s Instagram post.
Every single one of those moments is doing marketing work, whether you planned it to or not.
This is why brand consistency isn’t a ‘nice to have’
Here’s where it gets uncomfortable for lots of sites: if a family bounces between your Facebook page, your website, a printed event poster, and a booking confirmation email, and each one looks and sounds like it was made by a different business, you’re not building trust with repetition. You’re creating friction and uncertainty, and friction is what causes people to abandon the loop entirely and book somewhere else instead.
Consistent branding across every touchpoint does the opposite. It means that no matter which stage a visitor is at, or how many times they’ve circled back, everything they see reinforces the same recognisable, trustworthy identity:
– Visual consistency: the same logo usage, colours, and photography style across your website, socials, signage, and printed materials, so a customer recognises you instantly whether they’re seeing a dibond board at the gate or a Facebook ad on their phone.
– Tone of voice consistency: whether it’s a witty Instagram caption, a formal event confirmation email, or wayfinding signage on-site, the voice should feel like it’s coming from the same place, because to the customer, it is.
– Message consistency: your key selling points (what makes a day at your farm worth the trip) should show up whether someone’s reading a blog post about family days out, checking your booking page, or scrolling reviews on TripAdvisor.
When branding is consistent the customer doesn’t notice. When it’s inconsistent, every touchpoint becomes a small question mark, enough question marks and they’ll go elsewhere.
What this means practically
You can’t control every place your farm gets mentioned, you can’t rewrite a stranger’s TripAdvisor review or a friend’s Instagram caption. But you can control the touchpoints that are yours: your website, your social profiles, your signage, your printed materials, your email confirmations, your on-site experience.
Treat all of them as one connected system rather than separate jobs to be done. Brand guidelines with clear rules for logo use, colour, and tone of voice – across all customer touchpoints.
The journey isn’t linear anymore. But your branding can still be the one thing that stays consistent through every twist and turn.