P&G invented brand management here in 1931 — and its own brand just went through the wringer
The city that built the modern marketing discipline is watching its two flagship companies rebuild trust in real time: P&G through a 7,000-job restructuring, Kroger through a failed merger, a CEO scandal, and a brand-new chief executive.
Benchmarks in this market
- Qualified CPG & retail-brand inquiries
- +168%Qualified CPG & retail-brand inquiries
- Brand-trust content engagement, post-upheaval clients
- +46%Brand-trust content engagement, post-upheaval clients
- Time-to-market on rebrand and repositioning work
- -28%Time-to-market on rebrand and repositioning work
Illustrative ranges for engagements of this type, not verified Cincinnati-specific client data. Orientation, not a guarantee — your starting point changes the range.
How we work here: Remotely from our San Francisco office, with ET coverage for calls and travel for kickoffs. We don't claim a Cincinnati office we don't have.
Clients across every market
What's actually different about the Cincinnati metro
Procter & Gamble has been headquartered in Cincinnati since its founding in 1837, employs roughly 107,000 people globally, and has been the world's largest advertiser by spend in nearly every year Ad Age has tracked the ranking since 1987. What matters more for how this city works is that P&G invented the modern brand-management system in 1931 — the practice of assigning a dedicated manager to own a single product's positioning, competitive strategy, and P&L, which is now standard structure across essentially every consumer company on earth. That single decision seeded a real agency ecosystem here: nine of Cincinnati's top 25 marketing and branding firms still count P&G as a client today, including Barefoot Proximity, LPK, Northlich, and local offices of Landor and Interbrand. Kroger, America's largest pure grocery retailer, has been headquartered here since 1883 and runs 84.51° — its data-science and retail-media subsidiary, named for Cincinnati's latitude — out of a 280,000-square-foot building downtown, drawing on transaction data from nearly half of U.S. households. Fifth Third Bank rounds out the anchor roster, currently expanding its downtown Cincinnati workforce by roughly 750 jobs. This isn't a market coasting on its 1931 invention, either — both flagship companies are mid-upheaval right now in ways that make brand and marketing credibility a live, current problem rather than a historical footnote.
Kroger just lived through one of the most dramatic corporate arcs in recent retail history
In fourteen months: a $24.6B merger with Albertsons collapsed in December 2024 after regulatory intervention, longtime CEO Rodney McMullen resigned in March 2025 following a board ethics investigation into personal conduct, roughly 1,000 corporate employees were laid off in August 2025 including cuts at the Cincinnati headquarters, and Greg Foran — former Walmart U.S. CEO — was named permanent CEO in February 2026 to lead a fresh turnaround. A company that public going through that much change is exactly the kind of client who needs marketing partners who can rebuild trust methodically, not paper over it.
P&G is restructuring even while reinvesting in its own backyard
The company announced 7,000 non-manufacturing job cuts over two years in June 2025, while simultaneously relocating roughly 300 jobs into its downtown Cincinnati headquarters and moving 1,200 more to nearby Mason — meaning the world's largest advertiser is actively reshuffling its own Cincinnati-area footprint, not just cutting headcount from a distance.
The agency ecosystem here has real depth, and real reasons to look outside it right now
Nine of the city's top marketing firms already work with P&G, which means the incumbent agency relationships here are genuinely sophisticated — but a company going through the kind of upheaval Kroger just experienced often needs an outside perspective precisely because every entrenched local vendor has some version of the old relationship to protect.
84.51°'s retail-media data is a real, underused positioning asset for Cincinnati brands
A local data-science operation drawing on transactions from nearly half of U.S. households is a genuine local resource, and a Cincinnati-based CPG or retail brand that isn't at least evaluating what that data could inform about its own customer base is leaving a home-field advantage unused.
What usually moves first in Cincinnati.
Based on what tends to be the binding constraint for companies in this market. Your audit may point somewhere else — we go where the numbers say.
Industry playbooks relevant in Cincinnati
The part clients actually remember.
Not the reports. The uncomfortable conversation that changed the trajectory.
Our offices had been competing against each other in Google for years without anyone realizing it. Fixing that alone changed the numbers before any new content was even published.
We were generating 400 leads a month and closing nothing. Now we generate almost no leads and close eight-figure pipeline. Marketing and sales finally look at the same screen.
We hired a marketing agency and got told, in week one, that we had a privacy problem nobody had spotted in two years. That conversation was not what we expected and it was the most valuable thing anyone has done for us.
Cincinnati questions, answered straight.
Not on spend, and we wouldn't pitch it that way — the honest opportunity is category-specific positioning and channels where a large incumbent's generalist scale is actually a disadvantage, not trying to outspend the world's largest advertiser at its own game.
Other markets we work in
Let's look at your numbers.
A free 30-minute teardown of your funnel, ads, and site — run against what actually works in the Cincinnati metro. You keep the findings either way.