2. What is an
audience?
Audience is the one of the main things you should be thinking about when
producing. This is because they are the people that are helping you keep your job in
as a producer.
Your main objective is to engage and attract your audience. You can do this by
finding out there age, interests, financial status etc. This is ‘defining your audience’
you will need to research and find out what your audience wants before you can
make a successful and pleasing media product. You also need to look if there is an
actual audience for your media product because if there is no audience your
product will fail.
Audiences are very important because they are the people consuming your
product if no one is consuming you wont be in business. Audience is also important
because an audience talks, if you have captured a big enough audience your
audience will progressively grow because more and more people will find out
about your product due to the audience talking about it. Word of mouth is one of
the free biggest money makers.
3. An audience profile?
This is an audience profile it contains
all the gathered information about the
audience you are researching.
4. Quantitate Audience Research
Quantitate audience research is used to gather information about your audience in numerical data or
data form that can be transformed into helpful statistics. It is used to quantify opinions, attitudes,
behaviors etc. Quantitate data can be completed by handing out surveys. There are lots of different
types of surveys – mobile surveys, online surveys, online polls, paper surveys etc.
Advantages
Quantitive research is helpful because it gives you good idea of what to know about the audience you
are targeting. This helps you make, improve and master your product. If you don’t know what your
audiences interests and intentions are, your product wont be successful. To make a great product you
need to find and capture a crowd and one of the best ways of doing this is market research. Quantitive
research is very accurate and easy to go about doing, especially if you are making online surveys. It
takes ten minutes to make a survey on Survey Monkey. Surveys are also good because they can be
anonymous which is help for sensitive subjects.
Disadvantages creating the data, handing it out and concluding the data can be time consuming
especially if you are making paper surveys. You also need a lot of data to fully capture the audience.
There's no point in handing out 10 questionnaires if you are looking at a big audience. To fully please a
wide audience you need to find out what the majority are interested in. People who respond may
share characteristics that don’t apply to the audience as a whole. This can make a potential bias in the
research.
6. Qualitive audience research
Qualitative research is about the opinions and views of the consumer. This is different to quantitive,
in terms of open questions been used so the consumer can let you know their feed back in greater
detail. Qualitative audience research will help you find out how many readers you have also.
Methods including focus groups and face to face interviews are fantastic ways of going about your
research because you can have a proper in detail discussion, unlike quantitive its more about who
they are, what they like, what they don’t, how much money they earn and where they live.
Advantages are it helps you identify their target demographic in a lot more detail. This
type of research can find out a lot of things about an individual, you’re not just seeing
this person as a figure. For example you’re interviewing someone face to face and you
are having a discussion about why your magazine may or may not be offensive. The
person you are interviewer can give you all the reasons he/she can to help you
understand more from a different point of view in greater detail.
Disadvantages are its more time consuming it’s a long process finding someone to come
and speak with you and fewer people are studied.
7. Gender
Gender is a very important thing to think about when producing. It gives you more of an incentive of what
you should be doing to appeal them. Men and woman can have very different interests and will be
wanting different things in their media products. For example you are making a magazine about football.
The majority of that crowd will be men, so you will want to use a colour scheme more aimed at that
gender. Colours like blue’s, black’s, orange's, brown’s etc. This will push away the majority of woman
away but it doesn't’t mean to say women don’t have to enjoy it. If your looking to make a magazine for
both make the colour scheme more gender neutral and add colours and interests of both genders to draw
both of them into your product.
Age
Age is a very important thing to think about when designing your media products. Different ages can vary
in different interests. For example you are designing a gardening book and its about growing tomato's in
your garden. Majority of the people reading this book will be 60+. This is because you come to an age
where you are setting down and you have time on your hands to grow tomato's in your garden. Also if
you are 19 years of age your not likely to be having your own house with a garden. Another example
would be if you are designing a magazine article on skinny jeans. You’re going to be including images on
young people wearing skinny jeans not a 70 year old man. People are more likely to buy skinny jeans if
they are modeled on a young teenager then an old man.
8. Socio-economic status:
Socio-economic statues is a measurement of a person or group’s social and economic position in
society in a relation to others. Its purely based on their occupation, wealth, education, income and
their place of residence. There is a national Readership survey that uses six categories to help
define readers on newspapers and magazines. This is very helpful for example, you’re a publisher
for Rolex and you are wanting to send free copy’s of the magazine round to houses. Rolex’s
demographic are wealthy people in society. When coming to releasing this magazine your not
going to be sending it round an area full of working class and lower middle class people because
Rolex's cost around 10,000 pound. Handing your product round these areas would be a waste of
time and money. You'll want to find an area in society where there are lots of upper middle class
people. This way you will have more of a chance in making revenue.
9. To help you decide where your product stands there is
a grading system.
10. Geodemographic (post code)
This is a way of finding demographic information through
post codes all around the UK. People in the UK living in the
same post code have the same lifestyle, budget and
spending tendencies. This helps advertisers determine
where they are targeting. There is a website called ‘Cameo’
this website allows you to type in a post code and it comes
with all the information you need to know about that area. It
will tell you their age, their earnings, interests, hobbies,
relationship status, social class etc.
11. The map I have here that’s from the NHS. This
map tells me where all all the upper middle class
lives to all the lowest grade works lives. It has a
key on the side where it is colour coded.
Here I am going to locate where to place these
services and shops. I am going to highlight the
establishments according to the map.
• Mercedes-Benz
• Pay day loans
• Take-away pizza
• Life insurance
• Home repairs
• Estate Agents
• Letting Agents (house rental)
• Lidl
• Waitrose
• Tesco
12. Psychographics
This is a way of understanding the values, attitudes,
interests, lifestyles and personality's. This can be
gathered using quantitative research handing out
questionnaires. This helps you understand what
person is buying your product and it allows you to
please there needs more. This results in repeat
purchase and more revenue.
Cross Cultural Consumer Characterisation will help you
understand the different groups of people you are
wanting to sell your products to.
13. Mainstream or Niche
Your audience can be profiled either one or the other. Mainstream means are large audience that all
are interested in the same thing. Mainstream is a lot easier to target as you will already know what
the majority of the audience is interested in. Niche means a much smaller group of people with very
specific interests. If you are targeting a niche audiences you have to make sure you include all the
things they are interested in or you will lose the crowd. For example One direction is a very popular
mainstream boy band that millions of people enjoy. Solardo is a underground techno band that has a
much smaller crowd with different interests to One direction fans.
Here we have the mainstream band wearing
very casual normal mainstream clothes
Here is the niche band wearing clothes that are
niche and different.
