Re-branding animal activists and branding Australians: An investigation into the public relations work of Animals Australia's activist campaigns.

Public relations offers strategies that enable re-branding of an organisation's poor image. As branding refers to the image an organisation (corporations, non-profits and activists) presents to its broader public, then public relations is the work of image management. This conceptual paper uses these ideas to explore and understand the work carried out by one animal activist organisation, Animals Australia, to come to inspire and mobilise a mainstream audience in animal activism. Usually examined using social movement theory, animal activists have a long history of receiving only marginal attention from mainstream audiences, and, further, from being often branded and vilified as troublemakers, extremists, fanatics who are conceived as acting against the national interest, and ignorant of the realities of life and industry. At the same time they are extolled by some in strongly positive terms due to their demands for compassion, care and assistance for those who are voiceless and unable to protest their treatment or change the circumstances of their own suffering. This paper thus examines the public relations and counter-branding work carried out by one animal advocacy organisation, Animals Australia, to re-brand itself so as to effectively address and engage mainstream Australians in its public relations campaigns for improving the welfare of livestock animals. Through a conceptual and semiotic analysis of the organisation's investigative and campaigning work, and the way this has been constructed and framed more broadly, we demonstrate this counter-branding effort, and consider what it is making possible for the organisation and for its animal activism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]