Enquirer Consulting Group

Reachable Buyer Map

Prepared for Maxime Barlier · Vianova · August 2026
Here is the map. A public relations agency is the one business that never runs its own campaign, because the channel it sells is the channel it already lives in: reputation, referral and the network it can already reach. That works, and it has a ceiling built into it. This page is what sits outside the ceiling. The French consumer and corporate segments an agency of your shape sells into, who signs inside each one, and roughly how many companies are there. It describes the market rather than your agency, and there is nothing to buy at the end of it.
Food and drink manufacturers and brands
The deepest pool in France by a distance, and almost entirely small and mid-sized. That shape decides the message more than the sector does: in the great majority of these companies the founder or the general manager is the person who decides whether an agency gets hired, and there is no communications director to route around.
Who signs: the founder or general manager at the smaller end, marketing director and brand manager in the middle, communications director at group level.
17,000 to 20,000
food and drink companies in France, of which roughly 98 percent are small or mid-sized
Chained restaurant and foodservice networks
A completely different buying shape from the one above. Independents dominate the count and cannot be sold to at scale, while the chained networks are few, named, and each carry a real marketing function with a budget cycle. This is the segment where a finite, workable list actually exists.
Who signs: marketing director, communications director, network or franchise development director, and the founder at the younger concepts.
400 to 450
chained networks in France covering roughly 16,000 to 17,000 sites, against roughly 117,000 independent outlets
Beauty and personal care
A concentrated sector where a small number of companies carry most of the revenue and a long tail carries most of the ambition. The tail is where new agency relationships start, because the top of the sector is already represented and the bottom of it is scaling faster than its own communications function.
Who signs: communications director, brand director, head of influence, and the founder at emerging brands.
3,000 to 3,400
companies across the French beauty sector; roughly 350 of them sit inside the industry federation and carry the large majority of the revenue
Retail and distribution groups
Not a count, a concentration. Fewer than ten buying groups decide what reaches the French shelf, sitting above many thousands of suppliers who each need to be understood by them. That inversion is the whole reason corporate and reputation work matters in this segment: the audience is small, senior, and permanent.
Who signs: corporate communications director, external affairs or public affairs director, sustainability director, and the group secretary general.
Fewer than ten national groups
plus their purchasing alliances; a named list, not a volume play
Mid-cap corporates and industry
The segment where a corporate and sustainability communications buyer reliably exists, because above this size line the reporting duties, the works council, the investors and the trade press all create one. This is the tier that hires for corporate reputation rather than for a product launch, and it buys on a yearly rhythm rather than a campaign.
Who signs: communications director, sustainability or corporate responsibility director, director of public affairs, chief of staff to the president.
6,000 to 6,500
French mid-cap and large companies at 250 people or more, of which roughly 300 are large groups
Federations, trade bodies and public authorities
The buyer type with no clean register anywhere, which is exactly why it stays underworked by every agency including the ones that serve it well. Sector federations, interbranch organizations, professional unions and local authorities each buy communications, each on a mandate cycle, and each are reached by name and by mandate rather than by list.
Who signs: the director general, the communications lead, the elected president, the cabinet director on the public side.
No usable register
identified one at a time; the difficulty of building the list is the reason the segment stays open

Where the openings are

1
The two ends of the food market do not buy the same way, and one message cannot serve both. Seventeen to twenty thousand food and drink companies where the founder signs personally, against a few hundred chained networks where a marketing director signs on a budget cycle. Those are two lists, two opening lines and two follow-up rhythms. Most outreach into this sector writes one and sends it to both, which is why the reply rate reads as a market problem when it is a segmentation problem.
2
Referral selects for overlap, not for fit. An agency that grows on reputation reaches the slice of the market that already touches it. The rest of the companies above are not unqualified, they are simply unaware, and no amount of good work reaches them because good work is only visible to people already watching.
3
The corporate and sustainability buyer is newly created, and that is the opening. Reporting obligations have pushed a named internal owner into companies that did not have one two years ago, and a new owner with a new duty and no incumbent agency is the single easiest first conversation on this page. That window closes as the tier gets covered.
4
The buyer is a role, and roles move. Communications and marketing directors change companies often, and a new one almost always reopens the agency roster within the first two quarters. A channel built on named roles catches that moment while it is still open. A referral channel hears about it after the decision is made, usually from the agency that won.
Built from public market data, counts banded deliberately. Figures are drawn from national industry federations, franchise and network surveys and the public business statistics for France, and they describe companies with payroll rather than every registered entity. Sector definitions differ between sources, which is why the counts here are bands and not figures.
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