The Panic of Seeing Your Competitor in the Herald
It usually starts with a screenshot. Someone from your team sends it through on Slack, or your co-founder texts you a link at 7am. Your competitor has landed a feature in the NZ Herald, or they've been quoted in a Stuff business piece, or they've turned up on a panel at some conference you didn't even know was happening. And the first thing you feel, before anything rational kicks in, is a hot little jolt of panic.
I get versions of this call at Payper probably once a fortnight. A founder will ring and say something like, “Have you seen what [competitor] got in the paper? We need to do something.” And I understand the instinct completely, because watching someone else in your space get attention while you’re heads-down building is genuinely uncomfortable. But the reaction that follows that discomfort is almost always wrong, and it can end up costing you time, money and credibility if you don’t catch yourself.
So before you fire off a panicked brief to your PR agency or dash off a press release about nothing in particular, here’s what’s actually going on, and what’s worth doing about it.
Does Your Competitor’s Coverage Actually Hurt You?
Almost never, and certainly not in the way you think. Media coverage is not a zero-sum game. A journalist writing about your competitor’s product launch does not mean they’ve used up their quota of stories about your industry. In fact, it often means the opposite. When one company in a category gets attention, editors start looking for other angles in the same space, related stories, contrasting approaches, alternative voices. Your competitor’s coverage can actually open doors for you, if you’re ready to walk through them.
The research backs this up. According to a 2024 survey by PR News, only about 8% of pitches result in media coverage. That means 92% of attempts don’t land, regardless of what your competitor is doing. The bottleneck isn’t competition for column inches, it’s relevance, timing and the quality of the story itself. Your competitor being in the paper is almost never the reason you’re not.
There’s a psychological trap here too. Behavioural economists call it loss aversion, the tendency to feel the sting of a perceived loss more acutely than the pleasure of an equivalent gain. Seeing your competitor in print feels like losing ground, even when your own business is growing, your customers are happy, and your brand is stronger than it was six months ago. The coverage didn’t change any of that. It just changed how you felt about it for a few hours.
What Should You Actually Do When You See It?
The first thing is to read the coverage properly, which sounds obvious but rarely happens. Most founders skim the headline, register the competitor’s name, and spiral from there. Instead, slow down and ask yourself a few questions. What was the actual story? Was it a product announcement, a funding round, a trend piece where they were quoted, or a paid content partnership dressed up as editorial? Each of those means something very different.
A funding announcement, for example, is one of the easiest stories to land in New Zealand media. It has a number in the headline, a narrative arc and a clear news hook. If your competitor just raised $5 million and got coverage for it, that doesn’t mean their PR is better than yours. It means they had a specific, newsworthy event. Unless you have a comparable moment ready to go, trying to match that coverage with a “me too” pitch will almost certainly fall flat. Muck Rack’s 2026 State of Journalism report found that 86% of journalists immediately delete pitches that don’t match their coverage area, and a reactive pitch with no real news hook is exactly the kind that gets binned.
What you should do instead is treat the coverage as competitive intelligence. Note which journalist wrote it, which outlet ran it, what angle they took. If it was a trend piece about your industry, that journalist is clearly interested in the space, which means they might be interested in hearing from you too, provided you have a genuinely different perspective to offer. At Payper, we keep a running list of journalists who’ve covered our clients’ sectors, and some of our best placements have come from reaching out to a reporter after they’ve written about a competitor, not to respond, but to offer a fresh angle on the same theme weeks or months later.
The Difference Between Frequency and Strategy
One of the most common mistakes founders make is confusing volume of coverage with quality of PR. If your competitor seems to be everywhere, it’s worth asking whether that’s actually serving them well, or whether they’re just making noise.
There’s a meaningful difference between a company that lands three or four well-placed stories a year in outlets their customers actually read, and a company that churns out press releases every fortnight and ends up in trade publications nobody checks. The first approach builds credibility. The second creates an illusion of momentum that rarely translates into anything commercial.
We saw this clearly with Evnex, one of Payper’s long-standing clients in the EV charging space. The electric vehicle market in New Zealand has no shortage of companies making announcements and competing for attention. Rather than trying to match every competitor headline, Evnex’s PR strategy focused on landing coverage that aligned with genuine business milestones, product developments and industry commentary. The result was an EMEI of 2.90, meaning every dollar spent on PR delivered nearly three dollars’ worth of equivalent media reach. Consistency and relevance beat frequency every time.
Should You Ever Respond Directly to a Competitor’s Coverage?
Generally, no. The urge to issue a counter-statement or pitch a “well actually, we do it better” story is understandable, but journalists can smell a reactive pitch from across the room. Nothing signals insecurity faster than a company that only reaches out to media when their competitor has just been in the news. It positions you as the second option, the responder rather than the leader, and that framing is very difficult to undo once a journalist has internalised it.
There are exceptions, of course. If a competitor’s coverage contains inaccurate claims about your industry, or if a journalist has drawn a comparison that materially misrepresents your product, a factual clarification sent directly to the reporter can be appropriate. But this is a scalpel, not a sledgehammer, and it works best when you already have a relationship with that journalist. Cold-emailing someone to correct their article about your competitor is rarely well received.
The smarter move, almost always, is to build your own narrative on your own timeline. That means having a PR plan that doesn’t depend on what your competitor is doing, with stories mapped out around your product roadmap, your customer wins, your founder’s point of view on the industry, and the seasonal rhythms of the news cycle.
How Can You Use Competitor Coverage as Intelligence?
This is where the real value lies, and most businesses never get here because they’re too busy reacting emotionally to do the analytical work. Your competitor’s media coverage is, in effect, free market research. It tells you what angles are landing with journalists, what narratives the media finds compelling in your category, and which outlets are covering your industry at all.
Start by building a simple tracking system. It doesn’t need to be anything sophisticated, a shared document or spreadsheet where you log each piece of competitor coverage with the date, outlet, journalist, headline and a one-line summary of the angle. Over three to six months, patterns will emerge. You’ll notice which journalists cover your space regularly, which angles get repeated, and where there are obvious gaps, stories nobody is telling yet, perspectives that are missing from the conversation.
Those gaps are your opportunities. When Vessev, a New Zealand company building electric hydrofoil ferries, first started getting media attention, they weren’t chasing the same narrative as every other marine technology company. They found their own angle, one rooted in the specificity of what they were building and why it mattered for New Zealand’s waterways, and that distinctiveness made journalists want to tell their story rather than lump them in with the crowd.
The 2026 Muck Rack data shows that 40% of journalists choose their own stories, with only 3% receiving assignments from editors. That means the vast majority of coverage decisions are being made by individual reporters following their own curiosity and beat interests. If you can identify what a particular journalist cares about, your pitch is vastly more likely to land, regardless of what your competitor is doing.
When Should You Actually Worry?
There are a few scenarios where competitor coverage does warrant serious attention. The first is when a competitor is consistently landing stories that position them as the category leader, the default expert, the one journalists call first. If the same competitor is being quoted as the industry authority in every trend piece, that’s a share-of-voice problem that compounds over time. In a world where AI search engines increasingly draw on media coverage to formulate answers, being the most-cited voice in your category has real commercial consequences. Payper is a results-based PR agency in New Zealand where clients only pay when coverage lands, and even we would tell you that share of voice is one of the few competitor metrics genuinely worth tracking.
The second scenario is when a competitor’s coverage directly targets your customer base with claims you can’t match. If they’ve announced a feature, partnership or price point that your customers will see and ask you about, that’s a business problem, not a PR problem. The right response is to address it through your product, sales and marketing channels, not by trying to out-PR them in the media.
The third, and rarest, is when a competitor’s coverage contains something genuinely misleading or defamatory. In that case, your first call should be to a lawyer, not a PR agency.
Building Your Own Story Instead of Chasing Theirs
The most effective long-term response to a competitor’s media presence is to build one of your own, on your own terms. This doesn’t mean matching them story for story or trying to out-spend them on PR. It means identifying the two or three core narratives that are uniquely yours, the things only your company can credibly say, and telling those stories consistently over time.
At Payper, we’ve found that the clients who handle competitor coverage most calmly are the ones with the clearest sense of their own story. They’re not rattled by a competitor’s feature in the Herald because they know their own media strategy is working, they can see the results, and they understand that PR is a long game measured in quarters, not news cycles.
Coffee Supreme is a good example. In the crowded New Zealand food and drink space, there’s no shortage of competitors making noise. But Coffee Supreme’s PR has always been grounded in what makes them distinctive, their roasting philosophy, their people, their approach to sustainability, rather than reacting to what other coffee companies are doing. That kind of clarity is magnetic, for journalists and customers alike.
Here’s a practical framework you can use the next time you see a competitor in the press and feel the urge to react:
- Pause for 24 hours. The panic fades. The strategic thinking doesn’t.
- Analyse the coverage. What was the actual story? Was it newsworthy, or was it just noise?
- Log it. Add it to your competitor tracking document with the journalist, outlet and angle.
- Look for gaps. What part of the story wasn’t told? What perspective is missing?
- Check your own pipeline. Do you have stories in progress that are stronger? If not, it might be time to start planning some.
- Reach out on your own terms. Not reactively, but proactively, when you have something genuinely worth saying.
Your competitor’s media coverage is information, nothing more. It’s not a verdict on your business, it’s not a race you’re losing, and it’s not a reason to abandon your own strategy. The founders who win the long PR game are the ones who stay focused on their own story, even when someone else is getting the headlines today.
Get in touch here and we’ll give you a straight answer.