F&B Exclusively · CPG

Paid media for F&B CPG brands that know their buyer.

DTC and retail CPG food and beverage brands share one problem: generic campaigns that reach the right demographic but miss the actual purchase motivation. We fix that with buyer research first — before a dollar goes to ads.

Tell Us About Your Brand → How the research works →

What's different

✓Buyer motivation research before any media spend

✓Creative briefs built from what buyers actually said

✓Separate DTC and retail media strategies — not one playbook split across two channels

✓Performance guarantee — 100% of fees back if targets aren't hit

F&B CPG exclusively. No generalist agency guessing about your category.

Two CPG Channels. Two Different Problems.

DTC and retail CPG are not the same advertising problem.

A DTC food brand needs to create demand from scratch and close the loop in a single session. A retail CPG brand needs to win at the shelf moment — where the buyer has a dozen alternatives six inches away. The research question, the creative brief, and the media strategy are all different.

DTC CPG

Build demand. Close the loop. Earn the repeat.

Direct-to-consumer food and beverage brands face a colder audience — no shelf presence to trigger memory, no retail associate to hand-sell. The ad has to do all of it: surface the right motivation, earn enough trust to convert, and set up the conditions for repeat purchase.

Cold acquisition strategy

Buyer motivation research tells us the exact trigger and emotional framing that converts a cold audience — not a demographic guess.

Full-funnel creative

Awareness creative that earns attention, mid-funnel content that builds trust, conversion creative that closes — each stage mapped to the buyer's psychology.

Retention and repeat purchase

The most expensive buyer is the first one. We build post-purchase campaigns that turn trial into habit — before they forget why they bought.

Retail CPG

Win the shelf moment before they're standing in front of it.

Retail CPG success happens in a three-second window at shelf. Paid media's job is to pre-load the decision — so that when your buyer reaches that aisle, they already know what they're reaching for. That requires knowing what makes them reach at all.

Shelf-moment priming

We research the purchase trigger and build campaigns that activate it before the buyer is in the store — so the decision is effectively made before the aisle.

Occasion and segment targeting

Retail buyers don't all buy for the same reason. We identify the highest-value segments, their distinct motivators, and build separate creative for each.

Retail media integration

Where relevant, we coordinate paid social and search with retail media (Amazon, Instacart, Walmart Connect) for a consistent message across the path to purchase.

How It Works

Research first. Every time.

Every Schaefer CPG engagement begins the same way: we interview and survey real buyers in your category before we write a single brief. Not category research. Not lookalike personas. Actual conversations with the people who buy — and the people who chose a competitor instead.

What comes out is a specific purchase motivation — the exact psychological trigger behind the buy decision — mapped to the Why People Buy Pyramid. That becomes the brief. The brief becomes the creative. The creative becomes the campaign.

Buyer research

In-depth interviews and surveys with your buyers and your competitors' buyers. We find the real purchase motivation — not the assumed one.

Segment mapping

We identify your highest-leverage buyer segments and rank them by motivation depth, acquisition cost, and retention potential.

Creative briefs and production

Creative briefs built directly from buyer language. Ad creative that reflects the buyer's own words back at them — which is what stops the scroll.

Campaign management and iteration

Full campaign management across Meta, Google, TikTok, Amazon, and retail media. Creative fatigue monitoring and rotation built in from day one.

Channel Strategy & the Algorithm

Knowing where to spend the dollar matters as much as what you say with it.

Most F&B CPG brands are either on too many channels diluting budget, or on the wrong one entirely. We know which platforms work for which product types, price points, and buyer motivations — and we know how to work with each platform's algorithm to make the spend compound rather than plateau.

Meta

The broadest reach — when the creative does the targeting

Meta's algorithm finds buyers when the creative is specific enough to self-select them. Broad targeting with a precise motivator outperforms narrow targeting with generic creative. We know how to feed the algorithm the signal it needs.

Google & YouTube

Capture intent. Build awareness where the shelf isn't nearby.

Search captures the buyer in the moment of active consideration. YouTube builds the brand memory that makes the search happen. For retail CPG, both are often underleveraged relative to what they return.

Amazon & Retail Media

Win the shelf moment for brands in retail distribution.

Amazon Ads, Instacart, and Walmart Connect reach buyers at the decision point. Coordinating retail media with upper-funnel paid social compresses the purchase cycle and lifts same-SKU conversion.

Working with the algorithm

We don't fight the algorithm. We feed it.

Modern platform algorithms find buyers better than most manual targeting setups — when they have the right signal. That signal is the creative. An ad built around a specific, validated buyer motivation generates a conversion pattern the algorithm can find and replicate. That's how spend compounds instead of plateauing. We build campaigns to generate that signal from day one: the right creative structure, the right creative volume, and a rotation cadence that keeps signal quality high as spend scales.

Channel selection

Not every F&B CPG brand should be on every channel.

A $25 premium DTC product and a $5 grocery SKU have completely different channel economics. We've run enough F&B CPG accounts to know which platforms work at which price points, which creative formats convert for which categories, and where the competition for your buyer's attention is winnable. We recommend the channel mix your budget can actually win on — not the mix that looks most comprehensive on a deck.

Read: Creative Is the New Targeting →

What CPG Brands Come To Us For

The three problems that keep F&B CPG brands stuck.

High CAC, low repeat purchase

You're acquiring buyers but they're not coming back. Usually a motivation mismatch — the ad promised something the product didn't deliver on, or delivered something different than what the ad led with. We fix the brief before we fix the media.

Creative that doesn't convert

Generic brand messaging that reaches the right demographic but speaks to nobody's specific motivation. The fix isn't better design — it's sourcing the brief from actual buyer interviews instead of the brand deck.

Spend scaling without results

More budget, same creative, declining returns. The Marketing Efficiency Paradox — more spend often produces worse results when the creative isn't built on a validated motivator. We solve the root cause, not the symptoms.

CPG Client Results