For industrial brands choosing a B2B public relations agency, specialist sector expertise is often the main draw. But that same experience may mean it already works with some of your competitors, customers, suppliers, or partners. So where is the line between valuable industry knowledge and relationships, and a genuine conflict of interest?
Key takeaways
• The deeper a PR agency’s sector expertise, the more likely its client relationships will overlap. However, market overlap and an actual conflict of interest are different things.
• Competitive knowledge can make communications more effective as it helps an agency recognise what is genuinely distinctive rather than simply repeating familiar industry messages.
• The critical issue is how the agency manages what it knows: protecting confidential information, keeping client objectives separate, and being transparent about relevant relationships.
• The question to ask during the procurement process is not just who else an agency works with but whether it can bring broad industry experience to your work, without allowing another client’s interests to influence it.
“Do you have any conflicts of interest?” is a standard question in PR agency selection processes. If you’re going to share commercially sensitive information, give an agency team access to senior people, and trust them with your reputation, you need to know that its other client relationships won’t compromise the work it does for you.
The trouble is, if you want to work with an agency that specialises in your industry – because of the depth of understanding and media contacts it brings – it’s likely already working with organisations whose interests overlap with yours.
Take construction equipment, for example. There are competing OEMs and competing dealers. Dealers’ attention is also often divided between multiple OEM brands. Rental companies are both customers and competitors of dealers, while dealers and auction houses can compete for used-equipment business and against new machines from OEMs.
A specialist construction equipment PR agency, such as SE10, may work with several of these organisations, as well as component suppliers, exhibitions, and end-users. If an agency specialising in a tightly connected industry refused to work with every organisation whose interests might overlap somehow with an existing client, its ability to build genuine sector expertise would quickly become constrained.
Overlapping interests with distinct communications objectives
On paper, the relationships can seem complicated, but when you look at the communications objectives, they become much clearer. They might all touch some of the same products or customers, but each organisation has a different question to answer.
• Manufacturer – Why choose our product?
• Dealer or distributor – Why choose to buy from us?
• Rental company – Why choose to rent from us?
• Auctioneer – Why choose to sell through us?
• Exhibition – Why choose to participate in our event?
The agency’s job is to understand and communicate what makes each one valuable to the audience.
The difference between knowledge and obligation
Working with different players enables a specialist agency to view the industry as an ecosystem and understand the different business models within it. They’ll be on top of who’s saying what publicly, how the market is developing, and what matters to customers and journalists. That knowledge helps an agency get up to speed faster in the short term and produce better work in the long term. But it also creates a responsibility: knowing what can inform its expertise and what must remain confidential.
Although an OEM and its dealer, for example, ultimately want the same thing – to sell more machines, parts, and services, they have different priorities and agendas in getting there. An agency supporting both gains a useful understanding of the relationship and can use that wider perspective to do better work for each side. That doesn’t mean sharing what one client tells the agency with the other. Confidential information, strategy, and advice remain specific to the client in question.
So what does responsible PR specialism look like?
Any existing client relationship that looks like it might present an overlap of interest should be discussed openly at the start of the engagement and managed throughout. That means being clear about:
• Confidentiality: Client information remains confidential and is not used to benefit another client.
• Transparency: Existing relationships of relevance should be disclosed so a prospective client can make an informed decision.
• Client-specific advocacy: When the agency is working for you, it is focused on your objectives and your audience.
• Professional judgement: Not every instance of market overlap is a conflict, but where a genuine conflict, or a material risk of one, exists, it should be identified and addressed.
NDAs, contractual requirements, and appropriate information controls provide important safeguards and sometimes the right professional decision will be not to take on the work. That’s all part of using specialist expertise responsibly.
The apparent conflict can be part of the value
If you’re considering an agency and discover that it already works with organisations somewhere in your competitive landscape, it shouldn’t necessarily be an automatic disqualification.
Ask how confidential information is protected. Ask how relevant relationships are disclosed. Ask how the agency ensures one client’s objectives don’t influence another client’s work. And ask what happens when it believes a genuine conflict cannot be managed.
Those answers will tell you much more than a promise that an agency simply “doesn’t work with competitors” because what counts as a competitor is not always clear cut and if sector expertise is one of the reasons you’re hiring an agency, some overlap of your competitive landscape is inevitable.
The knowledge that can look like a conflict could be the very insight you’re paying a specialist agency to have. The value of specialist expertise isn’t knowing only your business; it’s understanding the world your business operates in — and knowing exactly what to do with that knowledge.
Hannah Kitchener
Associate Director
About the author
Hannah is an associate director in the UK, leading strategic campaigns for industrial clients across the EMEA region. A professionally qualified journalist (NCTJ), she combines specialist sectoral knowledge in construction, energy, and materials handling with a strong network of trade media contacts to secure valuable coverage. Her expertise in inter-cultural communication, honed by degrees in modern languages and translation, is key to executing campaigns that succeed across diverse European markets.
