Public Affairs Strategy for Regulated Industries: A Practitioner's Guide

Regulated industries don't fail at public affairs because they lack resources. They fail because they treat it as a compliance exercise rather than a strategic one — reacting to regulators instead of shaping the environment those regulators operate in. Whether you're navigating a cannabis licensing regime, managing community opposition to a real estate development, or watching pharmacy benefit managers rewrite the rules of your industry, the fundamentals of a sound public affairs strategy are the same: define your policy position early, build the coalition before you need it, and make sure your government affairs strategy is coordinated with your public communications — not running parallel to it.

Why Regulated Industries Face a Different Advocacy Challenge

The regulated sector isn't one thing. A hospital system dealing with state Medicaid reimbursement rates faces a different problem than a food and beverage company navigating municipal health codes, or a university managing state appropriations. But all of them share a common pressure: their operating environment is shaped by decisions made in rooms where they aren't always represented. That's the core problem a public affairs agency should solve. The goal isn't just access. It's building the kind of sustained credibility with policymakers and stakeholders that lets you participate in policy conversations before they become legislative crises.

What Effective Issue Advocacy Actually Looks Like

Good issue advocacy communications moves in three phases: education, alignment, and activation. First, you establish the factual and policy record — white papers, earned media, third-party validators. Then you map and align the stakeholders whose voices carry weight with your target decision-makers. Then you activate them at the right moment in the policy timeline. The recent passage of New York's Patient Access to Pharmacy Act — targeting pharmacy benefit managers and advancing patient-focused drug pricing reform — is a useful case study. Advocacy campaigns like that one don't succeed because of a single lobby day. They succeed because advocates – led by the Pharmacists Society of the State of New York and supported by Marino – spent years building a public record, cultivating champions in the legislature, and coordinating a stakeholder coalition that could speak with one voice when the window opened.

Cross-Vertical Depth vs. Single-Issue Shops

Senior leaders in regulated industries often assume they need a specialist firm — someone who only works in their sector. In practice, the opposite is frequently true. Cross-vertical public affairs depth means pattern recognition: understanding how a zoning fight in one borough echoes a licensing dispute in the cannabis space, or how stakeholder communications tactics that work in higher education translate to nonprofit advocacy. At Marino, we work across real estate, cannabis, food and beverage, nonprofit, higher education, and corporate sectors. That breadth is intentional. It means we bring a practitioner's understanding of how different regulatory environments operate — and where they overlap.

The Infrastructure That Makes Campaigns Work

Stakeholder communications is the operational layer most organizations underinvest in. Knowing who your allies are is not the same as having activated them. A government affairs strategy without a communications infrastructure behind it is a half-built machine. Marino helps clients build that infrastructure: the messaging frameworks, the media relationships, the coalition architecture that turns a policy position into a public record.

Everything starts with a conversation.