Enquirer Consulting Group

Reachable Buyer Map

Prepared for Graham Nolan · Cartwheel and Co. · August 2026
In this category, work usually arrives through inbound and relationships. Both work, and both share a limit: they reach brands that are already shopping for a partner, or that already know somebody in the room. This map is the other group. The categories across the United States that buy experiences, activations and branded product, who signs inside each one, 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.
Streaming, studios and entertainment
The category with the clearest reason to build a physical moment, because a title has a launch date and a fixed window to matter. Small by company count and unusually concentrated, which makes it a named account list rather than a market.
Who signs: head of brand partnerships, VP of marketing for a title or franchise, director of experiential, and the publicity lead who owns the launch calendar.
2,200 to 2,600
US employers across film, television and streaming production and distribution that file a benefit plan
Consumer brands with a fan base
Food and beverage, beauty, apparel and footwear. The largest group on this page and the one where an experience is judged on whether it produced content and community rather than on foot traffic alone. Also the category most likely to buy branded product and apparel from the same partner.
Who signs: CMO at the smaller brands, VP of brand or consumer engagement at the larger ones, director of experiential marketing, head of creator and community.
12,000 to 14,000
US employers across food and beverage, beauty, apparel and footwear production and branded retail that file a benefit plan
Sports properties, teams and venues
Small by count and strategically useful out of proportion to its size, because a property knows which brands are activating this season before anyone outside the building does. Selling to the property and selling to its sponsors are two different motions from one relationship.
Who signs: chief revenue officer, VP of partnership marketing, head of fan engagement, and the sponsorship lead on the brand side of the same deal.
1,200 to 1,500
US employers across spectator sports, promoters and venue operators that file a benefit plan
Technology, gaming and platforms
Gaming buys experience for the same reason entertainment does, around a release. The wider technology group buys it for launches, developer events and category moments, and tends to run a smaller internal team than its budget would suggest, which is where an outside partner gets used.
Who signs: head of brand, VP of marketing, director of community, and the events lead who owns the conference calendar.
8,000 to 9,500
US software, gaming and platform employers that file a benefit plan
Financial services and insurance sponsors
The quiet spender in this market. Banks, insurers and payment brands carry long running sponsorship and hospitality commitments, and the activation work around those commitments is very often outsourced. Less glamorous than the entertainment lane and considerably more repeatable.
Who signs: head of brand sponsorship, VP of marketing, director of client experience, and the person who owns hospitality for the property they already sponsor.
10,000 to 12,000
US banking, insurance and financial services employers that file a benefit plan
Large employers buying gifts, apparel and lifestyle
Defined by what they buy rather than what they sell, so this group cuts across every segment above. Branded product for staff, clients and events is bought on a repeating cycle by a completely different seat from the one that commissions an activation, and it is bought by companies that would never brief an experiential agency.
Who signs: head of employee experience, internal communications lead, head of workplace or people operations, and the brand marketing manager who owns the merchandise line.
11,000 to 11,500
US employers at 1,000 people or more, across every sector

Where the openings are

1
The two published service lines do not share a buyer. The activation work sits with brand partnerships and experiential. The gifts, apparel and lifestyle work sits with employee experience, internal communications or a merchandise manager. Those two people are in the same company and rarely in the same conversation. A single channel tends to keep knocking on one of those doors. Two named audiences is a different reach problem, and a solvable one.
2
Awards and press reach the brands already looking. Recognition is a strong inbound engine and it selects for companies that are in the market this quarter. It is silent about the brand whose current partner is fine, whose head of marketing changed last month, and whose roster reopens the week after. Rosters reopen on people moves, and people moves are trackable by name.
3
The sponsor list sits behind the property. Between 1,200 and 1,500 sports properties and venues each carry a set of brand partners with activation obligations they do not always want to run themselves. Working the property gives you the brand, and working the brand gives you the property. It is the one segment on this page where a single relationship reaches a set of buyers rather than one.
4
In this category the gap is usually distribution, not credibility. The work stands up on its own and the case studies do the convincing once a brand is looking. What tends to be missing is the machinery that puts them in front of several thousand named brand and partnership leads who have never heard of you, on a schedule, and tracks what comes back. That is the part we build, and we hand it over when it works.
Built from public registries covering US employers with payroll that file a benefit plan, current to the most recent published filing year. Counts are banded deliberately. Workforce bands use plan participants as a headcount proxy, so they indicate scale rather than an exact staff count. Owner only and very small companies are not published in this data. Sector codes are self reported by the companies themselves.
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