Q4 - Who would be the audience for your media product?
To start with who my target audience is, I first made a questionnaire and asked a variety of people to answer it. This here is my questionnaire that I have carried out in relation to the target audience of my magazine. I have picked questions that will cover all areas of information and it will provide me with the research and information that I need. In my questionnaire, I have included qualitative and quantitative questions that will give me different responses and different variations of answers. Qualitative questions are closed questions and they will give me the hard facts that I need for my target audience research. However, qualitative data will give me lots of different answers because of it being an open question. To carry out my research, I first made the questionnaire using Microsoft Word. I then printed out 15 of them and went around college asking people to fill them in.
The response that I got gave me a rough idea of who I should appeal to. I have posted the results to this questionnaire earlier in the coursework. Although I had a rough idea of who would be buying the magazine, I needed to ask another questionnaire that would highlight a more in depth analysis of who my magazine would be aimed at. I needed to know the specific details for my magazine to truly target the audience and it needed to be precise if I wanted people to be attracted to the magazine. The audience is the most important part because if the magazine doesn't appeal, there won't be a magazine at all. After I had got the results back for both questionnaires, I was ready to make a reader profile. This would be a reference for me to have when I was making my magazine. It acted as something to look back at and then ask myself if it would appeal. Here is the reader profile below.
The above image shows a collection and a presentation of all the information that I have collected from the research and planning. This image tells me what the audience like, don't like and it tells me what they buy and how much they spend. The reader profile is also very helpful to a magazine from the advertising perspective. This literally tells me what my audience spends money on, telling me directly what advertisements I should include in my magazine. By having this, I know if my audience are going to take notice to an advertisement or not so it gives me more control and more of an idea of what will/should be going in. Here is a brief summary of what is in the reader profile...
- Gender
- Age
- Work Status
- Social class
- What they enjoy
- What they agree on
- How much they spend on...
Key Theories I have considered
Uses and Gratifications Theory is a popular approach to understanding mass communication. The theory places more focus on the consumer, or audience, instead of the actual message itself by asking “what people do with media” rather than “what media does to people” (Katz) . It assumes that members of the audience are not passive but take an active role in interpreting and integrating media into their own lives. The theory also holds that audiences are responsible for choosing media to meet their needs. The approach suggests that people use the media to fulfil specific gratifications. This theory would then imply that the media compete against other information sources for viewers' gratification. My magazine would be picked up by people out of their own will. They control what magazines they buy based on their own interests. So for my magazine, people would be picking it up for entertainment but for also the illustration on the cover, this being because they too have an interest in art. It has also been suggested that it could be down to personal identity, they see them self in something (Bulmer). This would apply to my magazine with the style of writing or the something being sold in the magazine. Dennis McQuail suggested it could just be for information, like the recent charts or reviews. It may be bought for something to talk about.
The Two-step flow theory and the Hypodermic Needle model were also considered but weren't as relevant to my magazine. The two-step flow theory asserts that information from the media moves in two distinct stages. First, individuals (opinion leaders) who pay close attention to the mass media and its messages receive the information. Opinion leaders pass on their own interpretations in addition to the actual media content. The term ‘personal influence’ was coined to refer to the process intervening between the media’s direct message and the audience’s ultimate reaction to that message. Opinion leaders are quite influential in getting people to change their attitudes and behaviours and are quite similar to those they influence. This is suggesting that one person influences the opinions on those around them. This theory is more relating to reviews or online critics of the magazine but it wouldn't relate much to a small group of people as they would tend to be more individually opinionated. The hypodermic needle theory suggests that the mass media could influence a very large group of people directly and uniformly by ‘injecting’ them with appropriate messages designed to trigger a desired response. The model suggests a powerful and direct flow of information from the sender to the receiver. It suggests that media messages are injected straight into a passive audience which is immediately influenced by the message. This theory doesn't relate to my magazine as it isn't trying to force an opinion and influence the audience in a strong manner. This theory relates more to, for example, Hitler's monopolization of the mass media during World War II to unify the German public behind the Nazi party.
