Key takeaways
• Journalists, social platforms, and AI models reward original expertise over polished but interchangeable content.
• Industrial businesses have a wealth of distinctive knowledge but often struggle to recognise and capture genuinely unique insights.
• The competitive advantage is shifting from producing more content to exercising better editorial judgement about what deserves to become content.
• Run every article, press release, and LinkedIn post through the ‘Could Anyone Else? Test’ before you publish.
Over the last few months on the Engine Room, we’ve written about how journalists, LinkedIn algorithms, and AI-powered search engines filter out generic content. But let’s be realistic. No industrial comms or marketing professional reading those articles is going to think “Aha, so that’s why my press release didn’t get any pick-up or why my LinkedIn post received so few impressions! I’ll simply stop producing generic content. Problem solved.” People rarely set out to produce content that’s surface-level or interchangeable with any other brand in their industry – and when they do, it’s not always that easy to spot from within their organisation.
Familiarity is the enemy of originality
Industrial businesses’ greatest strengths are often hiding in plain sight. The engineer who says “That’s just the way we’ve always done things” may be describing a unique approach that no competitor has ever developed. The project manager who casually mentions a workaround that prevents months of delays may not realise they’ve described precisely the kind of practical insight that interests customers. The data gathered over years of supporting equipment in the field may feel routine internally but impossible for anyone else to replicate. Expertise becomes invisible when you live with it every day.
At the same time, the opposite can happen. Businesses are naturally proud of their own investments and achievements, but internal significance and external interest are not the same thing. Customers and journalists, judge every piece of content against their own priorities, not yours. Your organisation is interesting. The challenge is recognising which parts of it are genuinely interesting to your target audience. This is where an external perspective, such as from a PR agency, can help.
Why distinctive ideas disappear
Even when nuggets of wisdom do emerge, they don’t always survive the journey to publication. Communications teams are balancing more channels than ever, often with fewer resources, while subject matter experts are busy solving customer problems rather than focused on content creation. Deadlines can encourage us to move on as soon as we have something good enough, rather than delaying to probe further and uncover a richer story.
Then comes the translation from expertise to draft. Technical nuance is simplified, commercial sensitivity removes supporting evidence, and approval rounds smooth away personality in favour of safer, more corporate language. Each decision is justified on its own but together they can turn transform genuinely distinctive information into content that feels interchangeable.
The ‘Could Anyone Else?’ Test
That’s why, before publication, we would urge all communicators to ask: could anyone else have written this?
If another company could change the logo and publish almost exactly the same article, press release, or social media post, you’ve probably communicated something that’s competent but not distinctive enough to stand out in a journalist’s inbox or on your customer’s LinkedIn feed or be surfaced by an AI model.
Not every piece of content has to be revolutionary, but unless it contains an insight, lesson, piece of evidence, or experience that only your organisation could share, the effort you’ve put into creating the content is unlikely to give your audience much reason to notice, remember, or act on it.
Better communications begin long before the writing
As AI makes it easier to produce polished content at scale, communications teams are going to be increasingly judged by the quality of their editorial thinking. Organisations that stand out won’t necessarily be the ones creating the most content, rather the ones who are better at recognising, capturing, and sharing the observations and expertise that only they can contribute.
So if you find yourself answering yes to the ‘Could Anyone Else? Test’, dig deeper. Ask another question. Talk to the engineer again. Find the customer example. Look for the data. Challenge the assumption. There is often more distinctive information than you first realised, because the expertise is probably already there. You just haven’t uncovered enough of it yet.
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.
