In search of cultural values: Examining public relations campaigns in multicultural Australia

The need to understand and work with culturally diverse internal and external audiences becomes more critical as global public relations practice gains momentum. Audience segmentation frameworks need to be considered in light of the highly mobile, diasporic and multicultural communities in which global public relations operates. To assume that global public relations audiences behave based on a singular set of national values is problematic. By interrogating existing audience segmentation frameworks based on the presence or absence of cultural values, this paper examines how multicultural audiences were considered in the development of Australian public relations campaigns. The analysis revealed that the use of existing simplistic audience segmentation frameworks hardly considered the cultural diversity of the multicultural audiences that Australia purports to celebrate.