Tuesday, 15 February 2011

Who would be the audience for your media product?

When creating a media based magazine, a specific target audience has to be in place for it to be a success. This allows the encoder to aim all the objectives at this specific audience and establish a good understanding between the encoder and the decoder.
Within my blog’s Target Audience section, I have integrated an appropriate target audience that signifies an age range, gender and social class to aim for. This was developed through the construction of a questionnaire using, which enabled me to establish a Lifestyle Profile which includes everything about my target audience.
From here, the production stage of the front cover has to be designed, and this therefore has to involve all the qualities of the lifestyle profile. To be able to ensure that I have included the qualities, I asked a small group of people the same questionnaire (used when establishing my lifestyle profile) to see who they thought I was aiming the magazine front cover towards. A positive range of answers were found and can be seen here.
Detailed information of this is available within the links above.

Monday, 6 December 2010

Target Audience Questionnaire Table


From my research, it shows that my magazine cover has been given a positive response with regards to readers.

At the start of this project, I had to undergo an audience lifestyle questionnaire where I needed to answer questions on what type of audience I’m aiming my magazine at. From this, I set out my magazine trying to fulfil all these answers.
As well as taking this into account I had to take on the form as an encoder, operationalising this theory into practice. I did this through giving the magazine a meaning with regards to the question answers, and displaying it in a way that the decoder (respondents) could understand and figure out who the magazine is to be aimed at.

Like I mentioned above, the response given has come back with a positive outcome. The 3 main questions of ‘What gender, age and social class?’ have all come back similar, demonstrating that the cover gives out an impression for those audiences.
I wanted to aim the ages range from 16-25, however a range of 18-25 has come back from the 3 respondents. This may be 2 years later that the intended, but I am not going to change it due to how close they are. I feel that even if they thinks it’s an 18-25 audience, 16 and 17 year olds will still buy it based on their music interest with Drum and bass.
Social class has also come back all the same with middle class being the set target audience. Like this, gender has also come back all positive with Male being the set target, and all respondents seeing this.

The type of car question has also come back in a positive way and though different answers and ranges were set, and average outcome similar to mine was displayed overall. I aimed the answer at a young persons ‘first car’ who would generally have a small engine car. In the society we live in, this type of car is set with the ‘drum and bass’ genre of music with loud and proud displaying symbolism.  Furthermore, with the average come out at 1.0-1.4 litre car is does display that the target set is something that other look for and is shown with the respondent’s answers.

The questions I’ve answered above for me hold the biggest representation and curiosity, however the others answers I feel don’t hold a massive meaning.  However, this isn’t to say that I’m not pleased with the respondent’s answers, as they’ve generated common answers and demonstrated an easily decoded magazine.

In conclusion to this research, it’s good to see that the ranges of answers are all similar. From this, it demonstrated that my music magazine can be successful within this genre, and hold importance within the target audiences.