Enquirer Consulting Group

Reachable Buyer Map

Prepared for Ella Horncastle · Hope and Glory · August 2026
Consumer PR is bought by one seat inside a consumer business, and that seat sits in a small number of definable segments. This map covers the UK: where those seats are, who signs the brief in each segment, and roughly how many companies sit there. It describes the market rather than your business, and there is nothing to buy at the end of it.
Consumer goods makers and brand owners
The largest countable pool, and the one where a launch calendar creates the brief. Worth being straight about a limit in the data: a brand that owns the label and outsources production does not register as a manufacturer at all, so it surfaces under wholesale or online retail instead. The true brand owner layer is materially larger than the count beside this line.
Who signs: marketing director, head of brand, communications director, and the founder at owner-run brands.
7,000 to 7,500
UK enterprises in manufacturing at 50 or more people, of which roughly 1,150 to 1,300 sit at 250 or more
Retail groups and grocers
One of the smaller counts on this page and the biggest budgets on it. Seasonal peaks give this group a fixed calendar, which means the buying moment is predictable rather than opportunistic.
Who signs: marketing director, head of brand, customer director, head of external communications.
2,100 to 2,300
UK retail enterprises at 50 or more people, of which roughly 420 to 500 sit at 250 or more
Hospitality, eating out and travel
The segment that lives on footfall and therefore on being talked about, so earned coverage is closer to a revenue line here than in any other category. Highly fragmented, which favors a channel that can reach several hundred marketing leads at once.
Who signs: marketing director, brand director, head of communications, managing director at group level.
4,000 to 4,300
UK accommodation and food service enterprises at 50 or more people, roughly 650 to 750 at 250 or more
Consumer technology, media and telecoms
Product launches run to a hard date and rarely slip, so the brief arrives with a deadline already attached. This is also the segment most likely to already run several agencies at once, which makes an added specialism an easier first conversation than a full account move.
Who signs: head of brand, VP or director of marketing, communications lead, product marketing director.
3,000 to 3,200
UK information and communication enterprises at 50 or more people, roughly 500 to 600 at 250 or more
Sport, entertainment and attractions
Where sponsorship, fandom and cultural moments are the product. Long lead times on the calendar and unusually high tolerance for creative risk, which suits an agency judged on ideas rather than on process.
Who signs: marketing director, head of partnerships, brand and content lead, commercial director.
2,500 to 2,700
UK arts, entertainment and recreation enterprises at 50 or more people, roughly 420 to 500 at 250 or more
Consumer financial services and insurance
Smaller by count and slower to appoint, because compliance sits inside the approval chain. The trade for that patience is that once appointed, the relationship is measured in years rather than campaigns.
Who signs: marketing director, head of brand, corporate affairs director, head of communications.
1,400 to 1,600
UK financial and insurance enterprises at 50 or more people, roughly 400 to 480 at 250 or more
The UK arm of an international brand
The segment that cuts across every line above and appears in none of them. The parent company is registered abroad, the marketing lead sits in a UK office or with a distributor, and the budget for this market is decided here. No public register separates these companies out, which is precisely why nobody works the segment properly.
Who signs: UK marketing director, country or general manager, regional brand lead, and the agency lead at the parent when the brief is global.
No public register
identified brand by brand rather than pulled from a list, and the reason the segment stays open

Where the openings are

1
The buyer is a seat, and that seat moves. Marketing director, head of brand, communications lead. A new appointment reopens the agency roster more reliably than any pitch process does, usually inside two quarters. A channel built on named roles catches the arrival. A reputation-led channel finds out when the review is already underway.
2
The international arm is the hardest segment to buy a list for. A brand whose parent is registered overseas does not appear in any UK sector count, yet the person who decides the UK spend is sitting in a UK marketing team. Reaching that group takes identification rather than purchase, which keeps it permanently under-worked by everyone.
3
Awards reach the industry. The brief comes from inside the brand. Trade recognition is read closely by peers and competitors and glanced at by the marketing director of a mid-sized consumer business who has never commissioned this kind of work before. Those companies are the majority of the counts on this page, and they are reached by being written to.
4
The counts are small enough to work by name. Add the countable segments above and the UK market at 50 or more people comes to between 20,000 and 21,600 companies, with somewhere between 3,500 and 4,200 at 250 or more. That is not a mass market. It is a list of named companies with named marketing leads, which is a distribution problem rather than a demand one.
Built from public UK market data covering registered enterprises by sector and workforce band, current to the most recent published year. Counts are banded deliberately. Sector classification is self-reported, businesses below the workforce bands quoted are excluded, and companies whose parent sits outside the UK are counted by their UK entity where one exists and not counted at all where it does not.
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