The most revealing number in Stoner Bunting's portfolio is not 8 million impressions, though it has those. It is 275. At the Kitchen and Bath Industry Show, 825 people posted photographs to the official selfie campaign. Two hundred and seventy-five of them - exactly one-third - posed with the same attraction: four service dogs demonstrating the usefulness of Wood-Mode cabinetry.
There were cabinets in the booth. Fine cabinets. There were designers, executives, dealers, journalists, competitors, and the usual acreage of trade-show carpet. But the dogs created the queue. Wood-Mode donated $5 to Susquehanna Service Dogs for each tagged selfie, eventually giving $2,000. Stoner Bunting had found a way to make cabinet customization visible, social, and difficult to walk past.
This is the useful oddity of Stoner Bunting. The Lancaster agency works in categories that can sound like a punishment at a cocktail party - gypsum, acoustical ceilings, flooring systems, industrial components. Yet its best work begins with the recognition that the product is not boring. The generic story about the product is boring.
The buyer is a procession
A consumer sees a wall. A builder sees a schedule. An architect sees an assembly. An installer sees weight, dust, fastening, and the prospect of doing something twice. A distributor sees inventory and margin. A manufacturer must somehow persuade all of them without flattening the product into a list of adjectives.
Stoner Bunting's market position sits inside that mess. It is an integrated B2B marketing and public relations agency, but the more precise description is an interpreter of long, technical buying journeys. Its roots are in home and building products. It now applies the same method to life sciences, agriculture, sustainability, and industrial companies - places where a broad consumer slogan is usually less useful than knowing which specialist can say yes.
The company sells strategy and planning, content, social media, public relations, digital advertising, lead generation, websites, video, trade advertising, and event programs. Those are the instruments. Audience knowledge is the score. Public client lists include CertainTeed, Kohler, Armstrong Flooring, Wood-Mode, Construction Specialties, Whirlpool, ShurTape, and Starnet Worldwide. Many make products that are specified by one person, bought by another, installed by a third, and experienced by a fourth.
One technically accurate message can still be strategically wrong.The quiet lesson inside Stoner Bunting's case studies
The tape that looked too domestic
Consider FrogTape. Consumers knew it. Professional painters, perversely, did not quite trust it because consumers knew it. The brand was rated first among professionals who had used it, yet sat third in the category. The first thing that failed was not the product. It was the signal around the product: this looks like tape for people repainting a spare bedroom on Saturday.
Stoner Bunting changed the audience before changing the volume. A national “See why” campaign explained professional use cases. A “Try it free” effort in 13 markets traded a sample roll for contractor contact details. Print ran in painting and repair publications; digital creative appeared on Google, Pandora, YouTube, and dedicated landing pages. The result reported by the agency was double-digit sales growth at three major retailers and hundreds of contractors added to the database.
The transferable idea is wonderfully unfashionable: trial can repair positioning. If the people who use the product like it but the people who have not used it misunderstand it, an elegant manifesto may be less valuable than a free roll and a credible professional scenario.
The campaign after the campaign
The Jiffy Lube assignment shows another habit: staying long enough to learn. The initial problem was seasonal - sell more plastic and electronic gift cards during the 2019 holidays. Stoner Bunting built a dedicated landing page, bought targeted digital media, and used several conversion points. Then the holidays ended, as holidays do. A brittle campaign would have ended with them.
Instead, the agency changed the message to vehicle safety and reliability, aimed at two new activity segments, and shifted more of the media allocation toward Google's display and search network. The sustained program produced 8 million impressions, 40,961 clicks, and 2,812 conversions. Reported monthly sales gains reached 180 percent for e-gift cards and 31 percent for plastic cards.
What changed their mind was not a revelation in a conference room. It was the calendar and the campaign data. The gift occasion disappeared; the need for automotive maintenance did not. The media mix could then be adjusted toward the places where the revised audience actually responded. This is less cinematic than a rebrand. It is also easier to copy.
Two pages for one ceiling
For CertainTeed Ceilings, the agency separated designers from contractors. Architects and designers received ideas about color, shape, style, and open spaces. Contractors received help with installation. Each group had its own landing-page path, supported by paid, owned, and earned media. Time on those pages ran two to three times the client website average. Adding a second video raised time on page by 50 percent. Nearly every visitor interacted with an infographic, and 12 percent clicked into it.
The technique is segmentation, but that tidy word misses the craft. Stoner Bunting does not merely put two job titles into two ad sets. It asks what each person is worried about at the moment the product becomes relevant. Then it builds something useful around the worry.
The CertainTeed Gypsum work pushed the method further. Drywall had become a commodity in the market's mind - “drywall is drywall is drywall.” Instead of shouting about specifications, the campaign connected wall performance to health, quiet, freedom, and flexible living. “If this matters, walls matter” gave several products one human frame while still leaving room for their different functions.
The part worth stealing
- Draw the complete influence chain before writing the campaign.
- Name one anxiety for each audience, not one benefit for everyone.
- Build a distinct proof or experience for each anxiety.
- Run long enough to see behavior, then move message and money together.
- Give people a social object - a sample, a useful diagram, even a dog - that makes participation easy.
This approach has conditions. It depends on genuine differences among audiences, access to subject-matter experts, patience for a longer sales cycle, and enough measurement to distinguish attention from progress. It is a poor fit for an undifferentiated product whose buyer makes an instant, low-risk choice. It also weakens when a client cannot support the promise operationally. A clever installer message cannot rescue a product that installers hate.
The owner who learned every room
Stoner Bunting was founded in 1984. It bought its North Arch Street building during a 2011 expansion, when the company added eight employees and 10 clients in a year. The agency says it now serves clients across the United States and internationally. It remains small enough that the institutional memory matters and old enough that memory can become a trap.
Cheryl Shinton offers an unusually literal answer to succession. She joined in 2016 as Director of Account Services, then moved through Managing Director, Chief Operating Officer, and President. In April 2026 she acquired the firm, becoming its fourth owner and first woman owner. By then she had spent nearly a decade learning how the agency actually worked - not only the glamorous front room, but the pipes.
Her stated expansion plan is adjacent rather than theatrical: take the agency's experience with technical audiences and long buying cycles into life sciences, agriculture, and industrial markets. Her position on AI follows the same pattern. Use it to sharpen strategy and talent, not replace either. For a firm whose product is knowing why two human beings need different explanations, that is less a slogan than a boundary around the business.
There is a satisfying symmetry here. Stoner Bunting helps clients stop treating the market as a faceless mass. Its own transition was entrusted to someone who had learned the business person by person, role by role. The agency's playbook is not that every difficult product needs puppies. It is that somebody, somewhere, already has a reason to care. The work is to find that person before buying the megaphone.