Audience Research

The main focus of any media product is for the institution to make a profit, and for this to happen to product has to fulfil the needs of its audience so they will purchase it. In 1998, Hall and Homes said “Any media text is created for a particular audience and will usually appeal most to this particular target audience” which tells me that, in order for your product to really get the attention of your chosen target audience, it has to be formatted to get their attention, ie understanding what they want and producing it. So for me to create a product that the audience would want, I first need to find out who the audience are and what they want. 

There are two main groups that I can target my product at, a mass audience and a niche audience. A mass audience would be targeted for mainstream products that are very popular across a huge range of people, therefore the product will make a huge profit. Institutions such as Bauer Media and other large conglomerate companies will mainly target the mass market in order to maximise profits across all sectors within the conglomeration. A niche audience would be targeted for products that aren't enjoyed by most people, but are by an audience that the mass market doesn't apply to. Targeting a niche audience would allow all corners of the potential audience to be reached and would allow a more intimate and personal feel between the product and the audience, whom are more likely to be regular readers when there are fewer products aimed at them. Independent companies tend to target niche audiences more often because they can be more invested in understanding their audience than larger corporations. 

In order to understand the audience, institutions profile their audience to see what they would like to see on the audience's ideal product and how they can represent different groups of people to make the product appeal to their audience.  I will profile mine through the use of a small survey completed by people on various social networks. The survey has been made on Survey Monkey and is at the url https://www.surveymonkey.com/s/QVSM757.

My results are as follows:



This tells me that my audience will include both males and females, so my product will have to appeal to both genders. Furthermore, it will allow me to understand the needs of both genders throughout the rest of the survey and find a medium point where the product will appeal to both genders.

This tells me that my audience will be young, primarily between 16 and 21, and so my product will be very specific in order to keep the attention of the this group. I also have a more mature secondary audience of 22-25 year old's, which is still fairly young and thus the whole survey will give me a good insight into the range of desires my product will have to accommodate. 

These results show a range of sexualities need to be represented within my product in order to appeal to the audience. Primarily my audience is heterosexual, however some sexual minorities are in the secondary audience and so their needs need to be taken into account too. 

This tells me that the primary audience consists of white British people, as would be expected, but the secondary audience includes a few ethnic minorities who are also British and therefore allows me to base my product around the British music scene.

This shows that the audience's income is quite low, which is to be expected with the age group of the audience, who are low paid workers or students. This means that my product will have to be worthwhile to buy and really make the audience want to buy it. Furthermore, it shows that the language used on the cover will need to reflect these social classes and use fairly simple yet enticing language. 

These results show that a huge range of music is listened to by this audience, however it an be assumed through media stereotypes that the popularity in classical, jazz, folk, country and western and pop music is based in the female and/or sexual minority audiences, however this may not be the case. It is clear that rock music is the most popular genre and that my product should be based on that, with influence of metal. This demonstrates that the audience is in the niche market, and despite the earlier assumption, it will need to fulfil the needs of males, females, heterosexuals and sexual minorities.

This tells me that most of the audience do not currently buy music magazines and therefore there is a gap in the market for a magazine that would appeal to them enough to make them want to buy it. 

This demonstrates that the audience would like to see a range of things within their ideal music magazine, however the main things include information on new and current musicians as well as reviews. Therefore, along with my front cover and contents page my feature article will take the form of a review, due to the fat that this is something that most of the audience would want to read.

This graph shows very clearly that my product will need to display a colour palette of red, yellow, black, indigo, blue and white as these are the colours the audience wants to see. I will use some of these colours on the cover and contents and then alter the colour palette for the feature article to accommodate all of these colours because using all of them at the same time would make the pages look too busy and overcrowded and it would not fit the common convention of a simple colour palette for rock magazines. 

This question was based on the uses and gratification theory to indicate the exact needs of the target audience in why they want this particular product. The results state that the audience want this product to feel like they are part of a group of like-minded people, to keep them from being bored, to give information about the music, artists and shows and possibly for procrastination and/or to take their mind off of something. So my product will need to be substantial, factual and entertaining.