The CPG Marketing Agency Built for Brands That Refuse to Be Outspent — and Refuse to Lose
You're a challenger. You don't have the budget of a Kraft or a PepsiCo, but you've got a product that deserves to win at shelf. What you need is a CPG marketing agency that knows how to turn limited budgets into outsized results — one that's been doing this longer than most agencies have existed.
Hangar12 is a consumer packaged goods marketing agency with five decades of battle-tested experience in the CPG trenches. We specialize in helping food and beverage and personal care brands — especially challengers — build the kind of marketing engines that don't just generate impressions but move product off shelves. We're a third-generation, family-built agency, and we operate with one principle: your consumer comes first, or nothing else matters.
If you're a brand manager or marketing director at a CPG company tired of agencies that treat your brand like a line item, you're in the right place.
Why We're Different
Why Hangar12 Is Not Your Typical CPG Digital Marketing Agency
There are hundreds of agencies that will call themselves a CPG digital marketing agency. Most of them bolted "CPG" onto their capabilities deck last quarter because the category is hot. We've been here for 50 years.
Hangar12 was founded in 1975 and Jack Arthur Keating was an early employee. He was a WWII veteran who earned the Distinguished Flying Cross for flying 35 missions in the European theatre. He brought that same intensity to building an agency grounded in discipline, results, and an almost irrational commitment to clients. Three generations later, that DNA hasn't faded. It's sharpened.
Today, under CEO Greg Keating — who acquired the agency on January 1, 2024, carrying the family legacy into a new era — Hangar12 is a lean, remote-first team of CPG specialists. Not generalists moonlighting in packaged goods. Specialists. Every strategist, media buyer, and creative on our team lives and breathes the CPG ecosystem: the retailers, the buyers, the planograms, the promotional calendars, the brutal math of trade spend vs. marketing spend.
50 Years in CPG
We've survived recessions, retail consolidation, the digital revolution, and the DTC hype cycle — because we adapt, and because we deliver.
Remote since 2015
We didn't scramble to figure out Zoom in 2020. We've been a distributed team for a decade, which means lower overhead, better talent, and savings we pass to clients.
Small Expert Team
Each expert owns their domain completely and understands what their counterparts are responsible for. They have autonomy to get stuff done concurrently.
Services Overview
Full-Service CPG Marketing — From Strategy to Shelf
Being a CPG marketing agency means nothing if you can't execute across the full consumer journey. Awareness is useless without conversion. Social buzz is empty without retail activation. That's why Hangar12 delivers integrated marketing that connects every touchpoint — from the first scroll to the shopping cart.
Digital Media
Digital Media That Drives Real ROI
We don't buy media and hope for the best. Our [digital marketing](/services/digital-marketing/) team builds campaigns engineered around your brand's specific KPIs — whether that's trial, repeat purchase, or household penetration. As a Google Partner, we bring platform expertise and data discipline to every dollar spent. Programmatic, paid search, display, video — all optimized against sell-through, not vanity metrics.
For challenger brands, every media dollar has to work harder. We make sure it does.
Social Media
Social Media That Builds Communities, Not Just Followers
Followers are a commodity. Communities drive brands. Our social media practice builds organic and paid social strategies that turn passive scrollers into active brand advocates. We create content that earns attention in feeds dominated by bigger competitors, and we do it with a fraction of their spend.
We know the platforms. We know the algorithms. More importantly, we know CPG consumers — what makes them stop, engage, share, and buy.
Brand Strategy
Brand Strategy That Positions You to Win
Most challenger brand marketing agencies will hand you a positioning statement and a mood board. We hand you a competitive weapon. Our brand strategy work goes deep: market analysis, competitive mapping, consumer segmentation, and messaging architecture designed to carve out space in crowded categories.
Your brand's positioning isn't an exercise. It's the foundation everything else is built on. We treat it that way.
Retail Media
Retail Media — Where Digital Meets the Shelf
The fastest-growing media channel in CPG isn't social. It's retail. Walmart Connect, Roundel (Target), Kroger Precision Marketing — these platforms are where purchase decisions happen, and most agencies don't know how to operate in them.
We do. Our shopper marketing team has deep expertise in retail media networks, building campaigns that reach your consumers at the exact moment they're making buying decisions. If you're selling through major retailers and not activating retail media, you're leaving sales on the table.
The ConsumerFirst® Methodology — Our Unfair Advantage
Every CPG digital marketing agency claims to be "consumer-centric." We built a proprietary framework around it.
ConsumerFirst® is Hangar12's methodology for putting real consumer intelligence at the center of every marketing decision. Not assumptions. Not focus groups from 2019. Real, current data about who your consumers are, how they shop, what motivates them, and what's standing between them and your product.
Here's how it works:
1. Consumer Discovery
We start by understanding your consumer better than they understand themselves. Through a combination of first-party data analysis, syndicated research, social listening, and retail insights, we build a detailed consumer profile that goes beyond demographics into behaviors, motivations, and purchase triggers.
2. Strategic Mapping
With the consumer at center, we map the entire path to purchase — identifying every friction point, every opportunity for influence, and every moment where your brand can intercept and convert. This isn't a funnel diagram on a slide. It's a working blueprint for how to win.
3. Channel Activation
We activate across channels based on where your consumer actually is — not where it's convenient for us to buy media. Digital, social, retail media, promotions, in-store — every channel earns its place in the plan based on its ability to reach and convert your specific consumer.
4. Optimization & Learning
Real-time performance data feeds back into the strategy continuously. We optimize in-flight, not in hindsight. Every campaign generates learnings that sharpen the next one. Your marketing gets smarter every quarter.
ConsumerFirst® isn't a slide in a pitch deck. It's the operating system behind every engagement. Learn more about our approach.
Who We Serve: CPG Brands That Compete Above Their Weight Class
Hangar12 is a food and beverage marketing agency at our core — but our expertise extends across the full CPG landscape. We work with brands in:
- Food & Beverage — From better-for-you snacks to functional beverages, we've helped food and drink brands break through in the most competitive categories in retail.
- Health & Wellness — Supplements, personal care, and wellness brands navigating complex claims environments and demanding consumers.
- Household & Cleaning — Products fighting for attention in aisles dominated by legacy players with 10x your budget.
- Pet Care — One of the fastest-growing CPG categories, and one where emotional connection drives purchase more than anywhere else.
The Challenger Brand Sweet Spot
We built this agency for challenger brands. Not because enterprise brands aren't interesting — but because challengers require a different kind of agency. One that thinks scrappier, moves faster, and treats your budget like it's our own money.
If you're a challenger brand — doing $5M to $500M at retail — and you need an agency partner that understands the specific pressures of competing against category leaders with a fraction of their resources, Hangar12 was built for you.
We've helped nationally recognized CPG brands earn shelf space, grow market share, and build the kind of consumer loyalty that category leaders envy. Not with bloated budgets. With smarter strategy.
Tell us about your brand's goals →
What Working With Hangar12 Looks Like
We don't believe in long onboarding cycles that burn through your budget before a single ad runs. Here's what you can expect:
Month 1: Discovery & Strategy
We deploy ConsumerFirst® to deeply understand your consumer, competitive set, and retail landscape. You get a comprehensive strategy — not a 100-slide deck you'll never open, but a clear, actionable plan with defined KPIs and a realistic timeline to results.
Months 2-3: Launch & Learn
Campaigns go live across prioritized channels. We launch with intention but expect to learn — early data tells us what's working, what needs adjustment, and where we can push harder.
Months 4+: Scale & Optimize
With real performance data in hand, we scale what's working and cut what isn't. Reporting is transparent, frequent, and focused on the metrics that matter to your business — not the ones that make us look good.
Ongoing: Strategic Partnership
We don't do set-it-and-forget-it. Your Hangar12 team functions as an extension of your marketing department — attending your internal meetings, understanding your retail calendar, and anticipating needs before you have to ask.
The Results You Should Expect From a CPG Marketing Agency
We're not going to plaster this page with fabricated case study numbers. But here's what our clients consistently see:
- Increased household penetration through targeted digital and retail media campaigns
- Measurable trial lift from strategically designed consumer promotions
- Higher engagement rates on social media — from consumers who actually buy, not bots
- Improved ROAS by consolidating spend around high-performing channels and cutting waste
- Stronger retail relationships backed by data that proves marketing drives sell-through
We track everything against business outcomes. If it doesn't contribute to moving product, it doesn't stay in the plan.
Want to see specific results relevant to your category? Visit our blog for case studies and industry insights, or better yet — talk to us directly and we'll walk you through what we've done for brands like yours.
Why CPG Brands Leave Their Current Agency — And Come to Hangar12
We hear the same stories from almost every new client:
"Our last agency didn't understand CPG." They ran the same playbook they use for SaaS companies and wondered why it didn't work at retail. CPG is a different beast. Retail buyers, promotional calendars, syndicated data, velocity metrics — if your agency doesn't speak this language fluently, they're wasting your money.
"We were too small for them to care." Big holding-company agencies love landing CPG clients. Then they staff your account with juniors and give all the senior attention to the client spending 10x your budget. At Hangar12, every client gets senior-level strategy because that's how we're built.
"They couldn't connect digital to retail." Running Facebook ads is not a CPG strategy. If your digital efforts aren't driving measurable impact at shelf — at Walmart, at Target, at Kroger, at your key retailers — you don't have a CPG marketing strategy. You have a digital media plan with no purpose. We connect the dots.
"We needed a partner, not a vendor." Vendor relationships are transactional. We're not interested in transactions. We're interested in building brands. That's why our average client tenure is measured in years, not quarters.
A Legacy Built on Performance, Not Promises
Fifty years is a long time for any business. For an independent agency, it's almost unheard of. Hangar12 has survived and thrived for half a century because we've never lost sight of what matters: delivering results for CPG brands.
From Jack Keating's bombardier discipline to Greg Keating's modern leadership, this agency has always operated with the same core belief — that a consumer packaged goods marketing agency exists to do one thing: help brands win. Not win awards. Not win Twitter arguments about brand purpose. Win at shelf. Win market share. Win the consumers that matter.
If that's what you're looking for — a CPG marketing agency that's been in the fight for 50 years and still comes to work every day with something to prove — we should talk.
Ready to Compete Like You Mean It?
You've read this far, which tells us something: you're serious about finding the right CPG digital marketing agency for your brand. Good. So are we.
Here's what happens when you reach out:
- We listen. Tell us about your brand, your challenges, your goals. No forms to fill out. A real conversation with a senior strategist.
- We assess. We'll give you an honest take on where we see opportunities — and whether we're the right fit. (We'll tell you if we're not.)
- We propose. If it's a fit, you'll get a tailored strategy recommendation — not a template with your logo swapped in.
No pressure. No 12-month lock-in contracts. Just a conversation about whether Hangar12 can help your brand grow.
Hangar12 is a CPG marketing agency specializing in food and beverage brands, challenger brand strategy, digital media, social media, retail media, and consumer promotions. With 50 years of experience and our proprietary ConsumerFirst® methodology, we help consumer packaged goods brands compete and win at shelf. Learn more about our approach or explore our services.