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How Do I Stand Out From Other Farmers When Everyone Is Selling the Same Thing (Even Cheaper)?
Branding is the single most important thing you’ll ever do for your farm business. And it’s not what most farmers think it is. This episode breaks down what branding actually is, why it eliminates competition, and how to find your brand even if you have zero customers.
What is farm branding, really?
Farm branding is two things: who you help, and how you help them. It is not your logo, colors, packaging, or font.
A weak version sounds like “We sell fresh eggs from happy chickens” – that’s a product description. A real brand sounds like “We help busy families who want their kids to eat real food access the cleanest eggs outside of raising your own chickens.” The difference is specificity about the customer and the problem.
Why does branding eliminate competition for farmers?
When your brand is clear, you attract a specific group of customers who are not price-shopping you against other farms — they’re choosing you because of the relationship.
Two farms can sell the same raw honey. One brand might connect with health-conscious urban professionals; another with traditional homesteaders. Same product, different audiences, no competition between them. Charlotte has hundreds of farmers in her program, and some are neighbors selling the same thing. But they don’t compete with each other.
How do farmers stop competing on price with cheaper farms?
Stop competing on price by getting clearer about your brand.
The customers who buy purely on price will never be loyal – they leave the moment someone undercuts you. Customers who choose you because of your brand will drive past cheaper options to get to you. Lowering prices to match competitors is the commodity trap, and it leads to burnout and bankruptcy.
How do you find your farm’s brand?
Your customers tell you what your brand is, you don’t decide it. Interview them about why they buy from you, what problem you solve, and what their life looked like before and after finding your farm.
Inside the Profitable Farmer Marketing program, Charlotte gives students 35 customer interview questions. You ask each customer a few questions. Over time, the same words and phrases repeat, and that language is your brand.
How do you brand a farm if you don’t have customers yet?
Interview people who already buy the type of product you sell, even if they’re not your customer yet – friends, family, or neighbors who already buy fresh flowers or care about pasture-raised meat.
Their answers tell you the same things actual customers would: why they buy, what matters to them, what they wish was different. As real customers come in, you keep interviewing and refining. You can absolutely start branding work from zero.
Why is mindset part of farm branding?
Branding requires you to charge prices that reflect your real value, and most farmers have beliefs (“people around here can’t afford it,” “who am I to charge that?”) that block them from doing it.
Charlotte’s student Valerie 10X’d her sales – same farm, same products. The first thing that shifted wasn’t tactics; it was belief. That’s why mindset coaching runs alongside marketing work in the Profitable Farmer Marketing program.
What changes when your farm brand is clear?
Your website speaks directly to your dream customer, your emails get opened and acted on, your customers come back season after season, and price stops being the main conversation.
Other nearby farms selling similar products stop registering as competition. You charge what you need to charge. Customers refer their friends. The whole experience of running the farm shifts from chasing sales to receiving them.
Resources mentioned in this episode:
- Farm Marketing Week – opens June 2026. Sign up at charlottemsmith.com/masterclass.
- Profitable Farmer Marketing program — This June, get a done-for-you year of marketing assets built privately by our team. Sign up at charlottemsmith.com/mastery
FAQ
Q: How many customer interviews do I need to do to find my brand?
One is a huge success!!! Then, do a second one in a month or two if you’d like. They’re so eye-opening. I still interview a new customer at least quarterly.
Q: Should I have multiple brands if I sell multiple products?
No. Pick one anchor product and brand around the customer who buys it. Trying to brand for everyone leaves you connecting with no one.
Q: What if my farm products are basically a commodity (eggs, milk, vegetables)?
The product isn’t what’s branded – the relationship and the customer transformation are. Two farms selling identical eggs can have completely different brands.
Q: How long does it take to develop a clear brand?
The customer interview phase usually takes a couple weeks to connect with and sit down with a customer. Refining your brand language across your website and emails can happen in a couple hour focus time.
Connect with Charlotte
Sign up for Farm Marketing Week at charlottemsmith.com/masterclass.
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Here’s a question I get asked a lot and I’m going to give you the answer today. And that is from
farmers who say, how do I stand out from other farmers when everyone around me seems to be selling
the same thing and often they are cheaper. And so today…
answer is probably the single most important thing you will ever do for your farm business.
And I’m not exaggerating when I say that. It’s the thing that’s going to make you stand out in
Google searches and AI searches. And it’s the thing that if you’re missing it, it will contribute
to you not making money, not making the sales you want, or perhaps not being able to charge enough
to even cover your costs. So it’s the one thing. that makes the difference between a farm that
struggles to sell anything and has low prices even, or a farm where customers are loyal and pay
higher than grocery store prices. And that one thing,
the most important thing is branding. And I know what you might be thinking. You might be tempted
to think that, well, that’s your logo and your colors and your packaging, but that’s not what
branding is. Not the kind of branding that makes your farm profitable,
not even close. Logo and colors come. after you have a clear brand.
Because if you create the logo and colors first, they will have to change once you create the clear
brand. Think of the Nike swoosh. Nike did not invent the swoosh and then figure out who they were
selling shoes to and what problem they solved. They figured out that stuff first.
They figured out who they were selling shoes. what problem their shoes solve for people,
what goals their shoes help them reach. And the swoosh came about much, much later.
That’s what branding is. Okay. So that’s, it’s the thing that eliminates competition.
So now all of a sudden everyone around you can be selling the same thing at a cheaper price and
people will drive past them to get to you. All right. So then. Let me go over what a brand is
again, because again, most farmers don’t understand this. I sure did not when I started my farm.
Okay. It’s not your font, the colors, the logo. Again, those things come afterward.
It is specifically who is that one person that you sell to that you wish all your customers were
like? I call it your dream customer. Who is that person that your farm products serve best?
Number two. How do your products help them? What problem do you solve for that person?
What problem does that person have that they told you they have that you in turn are able to
communicate to them your products solve for them? Or it could be a goal, problem or a goal.
That’s it. That’s a brand. Who you help and how you help them. Here’s an example. Let’s say you
sell pastured eggs. A weak version that won’t convert into sales,
won’t make enough sales at a high enough price is something like we sell fresh eggs from happy
chickens, rotationally grazed. That’s fine, but that’s not a brand. It’s just a product description
and people don’t buy based on product descriptions. A real brand in that case might be something
like I help busy moms who want their kids to eat more real food instead of going through the drive
-through after sports practice. I make it really easy for you to get the cleanest eggs you can find
outside of raising your own chickens. Do you feel the difference? The first one’s a product. The
second one, that’s a relationship. Okay. It’s a statement that speaks directly to a specific person
who’s lying awake at night worried about getting healthier food into her kid’s diet.
So when someone lands on your website or your social media and finds your farm and and everything
you communicate sounds like you’re talking directly to one real person, she won’t be price
shopping. She’s not comparing you to the grocery store. She’s found her person in you. When you
talk like this on your website, on your social media marketing, talking to one person, solving that
one problem, she’s found her farm and she’ll be your customer for life no matter what you have to
charge. This is what branding does. It turns price shoppers into loyal customers who pay you a
profitable price without question. And so if your customers are price shopping,
or if your marketing doesn’t seem to be selling enough, It’s just a skill gap.
You haven’t identified and communicated your brand yet. And that’s all right. I give you step-by
-step instructions on how to create a clear brand. And then I turn it into your marketing for you.
In The Profitable Farmer, we actually create your marketing for you based on the brand that you
identify, that we walk you through. how to identify it. So we make it really easy on you.
All right. So why, here’s why you’re a brand eliminates competition. So other farmers will say,
Hey, there’s other farmers in my area starting to catch on to what we’re doing and they are selling
what I sell. What can I do to stand out? And my answer is always the same. When you have a clear
brand, there is no competition. This is not theory. This is what we see over and over again.
I’ve got 300 farmers that go through my profitable farmer marketing program every year.
Some of them are neighbors to each other, but they all are surrounded by other farms selling
similar products. Some of them are in the same farmer’s markets with these other farmers or
they’re… their classmates in the profitable farmer. Many of them sell similar products.
Like we’re talking eggs, milk, meat, flowers, vegetables. And the thing is they don’t feel any
competition between them. And that is not because they don’t know each other exists because they
do. And they’re in the same Facebook group together and they cheer each other on, but it’s because
they’re each serving their own set of very specific, very loyal customers because their brands are
different. I have 300 farmers inside the Profitable Farmer Marketing Program selling very similar
things, but 300 farms that look very different. And that’s because of their brand that I’ve helped
them create. Think about it this way. Two farms can both sell fresh flowers, but one farm’s brand
connects with a young mom in town who maybe she needs a break and a quick trip to the farm each
week is perfect for her. And another farm’s fresh flower brand is connecting with empty nesters who
love decorating and gifting flowers every week. These two farms are not competing at all.
They could be right next to each other and they’re going to have a steady stream of customers
because they learn to market to these groups very differently using the same tools I teach.
They’re serving completely different people, even though their weekly bouquets include just about
all the same flowers. Let me give you a real example. I have a client named Valerie in Pennsylvania
and when she joined my program, she opened a farm stand and started listing every reason it
shouldn’t work. She said our farm stand shouldn’t not be working because within 20 mile radius of
our farm, there’s at least five other farm stands. There’s six different farmers markets running
different days of the week. There’s multiple local butcher shops selling meat much cheaper than we
could sell it. And on top of that, She said her farm stand wasn’t even visible from the road.
And they live in a thriving agricultural community where, in her words,
everybody, everybody. and their brother is doing the same thing she’s doing. Okay. So she had all
these reasons why her farm stand shouldn’t work. Here’s what happened. She joined my program after
slow, slow, slow sales for years. Once she determined her clear brand and got her marketing focused
on her dream customer, instead of trying to compete with the cheaper farm stands and the busy farm
markets, she 10X her farm stand sales in six months. 10x her sales with five other farm stands,
six days a week of farmer’s markets, cheaper butcher shops all around her from a building you can’t
even see from the road. That’s what branding does. The cheaper farm down the road isn’t your
competition when you have a clear brand. When you communicate it consistently,
you attract your specific people and you only need your people.
You don’t need everyone. You just need the people who are a perfect fit for what you offer. And
here’s the kicker. These people will pay what you need to charge. They don’t argue with your price
because they’re not just buying flowers or eggs or beef. They’re buying the solution to a problem
they care deeply about that keeps them up at night. And it has nothing to do with the cheapest
price. So just know that we give you this clear branding process in the first week of the
We, my team, takes your brand and creates your year-long marketing plan.
Okay, please know that, that we’ve made it so simple for farmers. You don’t even have to start from
a blank page with your marketing. We do it for you. This is the first time we’re offering this
actually in the June session of the Profitable Farmer. It’s the only time we’re opening it up this
summer. It won’t be open again until November because we are offering this done for you marketing
plan only to those people who don’t join in June because it’s a brand new thing. We just started
it. It took us about three hours to create the first one. And we don’t know how many people we can
do in a five month period. So we’re limiting it. and delaying the next launch until we get all
these marketing plans done for these farmers who join in June. So if you want to participate in
that, I’ve got free farm marketing week coming up June 12th through 19th. You’re going to learn all
kinds of things more specific, a lot more specifics about branding and the power of one, and we’ll
rewrite your website, all kinds of things. So you can join that free. training all week long.
That’s at charlottemsmith.com forward slash masterclass. You’re going to learn a ton there,
but continuing on about branding. So let’s talk about the commodity trap.
I want to take a minute and talk about price because this is where many farmers get stuck. Our
prices on our farms for our farm products must be higher than the grocery store.
That’s just the reality. Because we have no economy of scale. We’re small family farms.
We’re not the huge corporations that sell, ship across the country, ship from out of the country
very cheaply to the grocery store. So that’s just the reality. We’ve got to charge more. And that
doesn’t matter if you’re selling flowers or food products or fiber products or seafood.
We just don’t have that economy of scale. So we can’t compete on price with…
stores and survive. It’s a race to the bottom. And what I mean by the bottom, either closing down
your farm or I truly hope not, but sometimes bankruptcy happens too. I see this regularly.
A farmer starts out charging what they need to charge or think they need to charge to be
profitable. And they look around and other farms are charging less and they aren’t making enough
sales. So they feel like they have to match that price. drop their prices, which means now they’re
not making money and they sure aren’t paying themselves. And so sometimes they’ll just pump money
from their day job into their farm for a few years until finally they burn out and they quit.
And that is the commodity trap. When your product is a commodity, which means a race to the bottom
in price, when you’re marketing it purely based on what it is and what it costs, you’re in a price
war that you will never win. And the way out of that is your brand. The brand is the only reason
people will go out of their way to find your product that is usually inconvenient and more
expensive. The brand is why they do that. When your brand is clear, price becomes secondary.
Your customers are no longer comparing you to the farm down the road or the carton of eggs at
Walmart. They’re coming to you specifically because of the relationship that we teach you how to
figure out what that is. Your values, the story, the problems you learn to solve all in module one
in the first week in my program. They’ll drive right past all the cheaper options to get to you.
Let me tell you about another client, Jenna. She’s in Michigan and they’ve been farming for 17
years and they have eight kids and they’ve moved their farm completely twice. When she came to me,
she was on the verge of closing it down because they weren’t profitable. And she said she didn’t
want to raise her prices because her customers are like family. She said they bought from her for
years and she couldn’t bear the thought of charging more than she was currently charging.
And I told her, your customers feel exactly the same way about you. They want you to stay in
business. They want you to be sustainable. They want you to be able to feed your own family. And
the only way, because she was ready to quit. The only way you can keep showing up for them is if
you stop losing money. And she knew that. So she raised her prices, did the five-day launch like I
teach. And she was terrified to do that. But here’s what happened. She sold out her chickens for
the entire year at the new higher price. She sold out in early spring for the whole season at the
highest price she’d ever charged. She didn’t even have to mention the price increase because the
relationship she’d built with her customers was the brand and the price was secondary.
That’s what happens when you have a clear brand. Customers don’t price shop.
Instead, they trust you as the farmer to be doing what you need to do to stay in business and they
will support you doing this. I’ve seen this happen. hundreds of times with the farmers in my
marketing program, and I’ve lived it on my own farm. We would have customers drive one and two and
three hours, one way to get our products past cheaper farms even to buy from a farm they feel a
genuine connection with. And my clients report that as well. All right. So next, how to find your
brand.
Here’s the part where people usually expect me to give them some big complicated exercise,
but It’s really simple. You don’t have to decide what it is from scratch.
Your customers already know this. They will tell you what your brand is The people who are already
buying your products, and don’t worry if you haven’t sold anything yet, I’ll share with you how to
get your brand by talking to them. But people buying your products already know why they buy from
you. They know what problem you solve for them. They know what goals your products are helping them
reach. They know what you mean to them. They know what their life looks like before they found you
versus after. They know all of it. You just have to ask. So in the Profitable Farmer Marketing
Program, I give my clients a second. branding questions and after a few conversations it can be
even just one customer that they ask some of these questions to they’ll start to see very clear
patterns they’ll see similar problems similar goals similar reasons why people are buying their
products and it’s in their words not yours And this matters.
I describe this as marketing gold. When you describe your farm in your customer’s words,
then they land on your website, open an email or land on your social media.
They feel like you’re reading their mind and it feels to them like you get them. This is what
creates loyalty. And so if you don’t have customers yet, if you’ve just started,
What you’ll need to do is you’ll ask these questions of a person who would buy what you sell.
Doesn’t have to be current customers if you don’t have any customers yet, just people who would
purchase that product, not even necessarily from you. So if you’re starting a flower farm,
find a friend or a family member or a neighbor who has bought fresh flowers before. Even if it’s at
the grocery store, ask them, why do they buy flowers? Ask them, what does having fresh flowers in
your home mean to you? And ask them after they say that, how is that important to you?
What’s important to you about that? Ask them all sorts of variations on that phrase.
And I have all these written down in a document. Ask them what would make them want to buy from a
local flower farmer. And you will start to learn what your brand is. Now, if you’re selling meat,
say you’re selling pastured beef and you don’t have any customers, well, find someone in your life
who already cares about where their meat comes from. Maybe they shop at a natural grocery store or
they’ve tried to buy direct from a farm before. Ask them about that. Ask them about what matters to
them. Why do you buy meat? Why do you go out of your way to get meat from this particular store or
farm? What’s important to you about that? What does that do? What does that mean to you to be able
to eat this kind of food? What does it mean to you when you can feed your family in this way?
You don’t even need them to be your customer yet. You just need them to be the type of person who
might buy from you someday. Their answers will show you your brand.
And then as you do start getting customers, you will go back and ask these questions again of your
real customers, actual customers. And you’ll just keep fine tuning. Your brand will get clearer
over time and it will also change and grow. I talked about this last episode.
My ideal customer, she kind of aged along with me. I’ve had my farm going on,
you know, 17 years. And so as I’ve gotten older, my… branding evolves with that as well so let me
close this episode by painting a picture of what your farm life looks like when your brand is
crystal clear and you’re communicating it consistently and again we teach you how to do that we
give you the communication so a year’s worth of communication so you don’t even have to struggle
with looking at a blank screen What happens is when you’ve got your brand and you’ve set up your
website in the way I teach, it will speak directly to this dream customer. So when someone lands on
your website, she’ll feel like you get her, like you understand her. And I make that so easy to set
up. I have a website template that’s set up. I had it designed in a way so that branding is built
right into it. Therefore, when potential customers land on your website, they feel like it was
written for them. That makes them trust you before they’ve even met you. They’ll sign up for your
email list because they want to hear more from you. Your emails connect with them on a real level
because you’re speaking to them about their real problems and their real things they say in life.
And they feel like they know you. They trust you. And people buy from us.
when they trust us. And this kind of consistent branded communication is what makes them trust you.
All right. One more story I want to leave you with. This is Stacy in North Carolina. I think it was
about four years ago. She sat her husband down and they told each other this farm,
they had one more shot at their farm. They’d been losing money for a long time. And if marketing
didn’t start working, she’s going to go back to her nine to five and just raise food for
themselves. So she found my program and joined. And she said something to me recently on the
podcast that I think about all the time. She said, we had a website. It was set up.
It was pretty. And things still weren’t selling. I thought if you build it, they will come. They in
fact do not come. Those are Stacey’s words exactly in our podcast interview. But here’s what
changed. She got crystal clear on who her dream customer was. Not anyone who eats food or not just
people in North Carolina, but a very specific person. She built a lead magnet like we teach.
So dialed in, in her words, that if you didn’t answer six questions a certain way,
you basically weren’t her customer. And that was the point. She wasn’t trying to attract everyone.
She was trying to attract her people.
Like I teach in The Power of One, she and her husband until that time were used to raising
everything, chicken and pork and beef and dairy and meat rabbits and hogs,
all the things. We helped her focus to get to one thing and get that profitable and then work on
the next thing. This year, Stacey sold out her pork shares in six days at the highest price she’s
ever charged to customers who didn’t blink at the new price. A few years ago,
they wanted to quit. They hadn’t make money. And now they’re selling, like she said on the podcast
episode, $17 chicken breast to the poorest county in North Carolina because of her brand.
That’s the life you build when you know your brand. And it all starts with those two questions. Who
do I help? And how do I help them with my products? And then learning how to communicate it.
All right. So that was it for today. Again, we talked about farm marketing week coming up in June.
That is at charlottemsmith.com forward slash masterclass. I’m going to touch on a lot of these
things. You’re going to get a lot of, I think I’m going live six times, six different classes that
week for free. Profitable Farmer opens for registration. That’s the only time it’ll be open this
summer. You won’t be able to join until November. And those who join in June get their marketing
done for them. We do it for you. You still will create your brand. I walk you through exactly how
to do that. You give me your very clear brand. The instructions are in there. And then we give you
back your year-long marketing plan. It’s something I’m very excited to be able to offer for the
first time. We tested it out on a few people. It works great. And I can’t wait to offer it to our
clients. All right. That’s it for this part two of this series. And I will see you in the next
episode. Thank you. Bye-bye.
