Enquirer Consulting Group

Reachable Buyer Map

Prepared for Katie Logue · marlo marketing · August 2026
Agencies in hospitality, lifestyle and consumer goods grow the way their categories grow: by reputation, referral and the roster moment. That reaches the slice of the US market that already overlaps an agency's network and is silent about the rest. This map is the rest. The segments an agency of your shape sells into, who signs inside each one, and roughly how many US companies sit there. It describes the market rather than your business, and there is nothing to buy at the end of it.
Food and consumer packaged goods brands
The deepest pool for retained marketing work, because repeat purchase makes the payback window short enough to defend internally. Also the segment with the most frequent product news, which is the reason to make contact rather than the thing being sold.
Who signs: CMO, VP of marketing, brand director, head of communications. At the smaller end, the founder.
6,500 to 7,200
US employers registered in food and beverage production, of which roughly 3,600 to 4,200 carry 20 or more people on the plan
Restaurant groups and multi-unit operators
Single restaurants rarely fund an agency. Groups do, and the count that matters is companies rather than locations, which is a far smaller and far more workable number than the industry headline suggests. Openings cluster around expansion, a new concept or a new market.
Who signs: CMO or VP of marketing, director of brand, franchise marketing lead, owner or operating partner.
7,500 to 8,500
US food service employers that file a benefit plan; multi-unit groups are the layer worth working, and they are a minority of that pool
Hotels, resorts and hospitality groups
The segment with two buying doors in the same company. A property buys locally for occupancy and events, a group buys centrally for brand and roster. They are different seats, different budgets and different timelines, and each one is a way in when the other is closed.
Who signs: group CMO, VP of marketing, director of sales and marketing at property level, general manager, and the asset manager on repositioning work.
2,200 to 2,800
US accommodation employers that file a benefit plan; each one can carry many properties behind a single entry
Beer, spirits and beverage brands
A category where distribution decides the year and marketing has to earn shelf and tap placement, so the work is judged against a distributor calendar rather than a marketing one. Small teams, senior access, and buying decisions that move quickly once the season is set.
Who signs: marketing director, brand manager, head of trade marketing, founder or owner.
1,600 to 2,200
US beverage manufacturing employers with payroll; the smallest producers do not appear in this data at all
Beauty, personal care and home brands
The segment where the register understates the market. Brands that own the label but outsource production do not file as manufacturers, so they surface under wholesale and ecommerce codes instead. Anyone buying a list of producers reaches the factories and misses the brands, which is why this segment stays open longer than its size suggests.
Who signs: founder or CEO at emerging brands, VP of brand or growth at established ones, head of creator and influencer marketing.
2,000 to 2,600
US employers across personal care and home goods production and wholesale; the brand owner layer above it is not separately enumerated anywhere public
Ecommerce-first consumer brands
Defined by how they sell rather than what they sell, so this group cuts across every segment above. No retail buffer means marketing performance is the whole business, the decision maker is usually one or two people, and the buying cycle is short.
Who signs: founder, head of growth, director of ecommerce, retention lead.
1,400 to 1,600
US employers registered as electronic shopping and mail order sellers; roughly 450 to 550 at 20 or more people on the plan

Where the openings are

1
The roster reopens at a moment, not on a cycle. A new marketing leader, a funding round, a launch, a first move into a new market. Those seats turn over often in consumer categories, and a new one almost always reviews the agency list in its first quarter. That moment is visible from outside if somebody is watching the whole market, and invisible if you are waiting to be remembered.
2
Hospitality has two doors and they rarely open the same way. The property marketing seat and the group roster seat are different people with different money. One relationship at the group can reach many properties, and one property win is often the only credible route to the group. A referral channel usually finds whichever door happened to be nearest.
3
Referral selects for overlap, not for fit. The segments above come to somewhere between 21,000 and 25,000 registered US employers. Reputation reaches whichever part of that already touches an agency's network, its clients and its press. The remainder is not unqualified, it is simply unaware that you exist, and it is most of the market.
4
An agency's own outbound is the build that never gets scheduled. At most firms it is nobody's billable hour, so it loses to client work every week, and the result is a pipeline that depends on the calendar being kind. It is also the one build that can be handed over as a working unit with an operator who runs it, rather than a project that starts again each January.
Built from public registries, counts banded deliberately. The base is federal filing data covering US employers that file a benefit plan, current to the 2024 filing year. Owner-only and very small companies are not published in it, so these figures describe established companies with payroll rather than the whole market. Segment codes are self-reported by the companies themselves.
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