Oatly is a Swedish food company and one of the leading manufacturer of plant based dairy alternatives based on oats. They encourage people to consume their products because they are more environmentally friendly than cows-milk. Oatly’s two new co-owners, China Resources and Blackstone Growth, have caused Oatly tons of criticism since both co-owners have a reputation of not being environmentally friendly. The purpose of this study is to examine how Oatly is using public relations (PR) to meet young adult’s expectations in conjunction with the criticism regarding their new co-owners. The study also strives to investigate if young adults accept Oatly’s PR and therefore if Oatly’s charismatic legitimacy remains. It aims to answer two research questions, which read as follow: 1. How is Oalty using PR to remain their charismatic legitimacy among young adults? - What seems to be the purpose with the PR? 2. Do young adults accept Oatly’s PR? - Is the company’s charismatic legitimacy remaining according to young adults since Oatly’s new co-owners? The study is based on the theory of legitimacy by Max Weber (1938) interpreted by Arild Wæraas (2018), with main focus on the charismatic level of legitimacy. A critical discourse analysis focusing on two texts published by Oalty themselves, complemented by focusgroup discussions will be implemented to achieve the purpose of the study and answer the research questions. The study shows that the participants in the focusgroups don’t accept Oalty ́s PR since they thought Oalty could have responded more professionally to the criticism. Despite this the young adults disagree regarding if Oatly’s charismatic legitimacy remains. The study contributes with knowledge about how young adults think critically about hypocrisy and how this affects their attitude towards a company. Especially due to how they identify themselves with the company.

The airline sector is facing a new reality post-covid, where leisure travel is increasing around the world. Furthermore, there is a change which permeates the entire western world, where the postmodern society increasingly advocates emotional qualities over rational qualities in organizations. Furthermore, external communication in the form of ad campaigns plays an important role in not only establishing grounds for legitimacy, but also establishing a projected image for organizations. Regarding the shift to an emotional and charismatic based reality, as well as the new trend in air travel, the aim of this study is to investigate how Scandinavia's flag carrier SAS expresses its image in ad campaigns, and to seek how they attempt to obtain charismatic legitimacy. We analyze five multimodal texts from two different ad campaigns to conduct a social semiotic multimodal comparative study. The multimodal texts are retrieved from SAS 2014-campaign “We Are Travelers”, and their latest campaign “Journeys That Matter”, launched fall of 2022. The analysis is backed by Michael Halliday’s theory on social semiotics, and it also operationalizes a postmodern take on attribution theory, which seeks implementations of charismatic legitimation in both ad campaigns. Based on attribution theory, as well as the multimodal analysis, we identify themes within “We Are Travelers” of business travelers being collectivized, and themes in “Journeys That Matter” of human diversity and warmth. Furthermore, none of the ad campaigns portray the qualities needed to consider SAS as being charismatically legitimate, although “Journeys That Matter” reaches closer in that regard.