Target Audience

Every successful product has done in depth target audience research before creating the product to find out what kind of things they should include to make it appeal to their specific audience. They also do target audience research after they have created the product to find out if it lives up to the expectations of the audience. The type of target audience they do includes mainly questionnaires/surveys.

Applying The Uses And Gratification Theory To My Product
The uses and gratification theory is an idea of how and why people use the media to satisfy their needs. For instance, people read magazines for entertainment, to gain education and for relaxation. Blumer & Katz (1974) are the main theorists who support this idea.

The type of audience I want to read my magazine is the same audience who read magazines such as Kerrang! and Rocksound. Girls and boys who like rock and alternative music, from the ages 14-24. I would like for my magazine to be available to people in as many countries as possible however news and events such as tours will mainly be in the UK, America and on occasion the rest of Europe (mainly Germany, France, Spain etc). According to Hall teenagers/young people like to rebel and their behaviour is of an extreme type so my magazine will most likely conform to this stereotype so that it appeals to these types of people. The social class who is the most likely to read my magazine is class E - students and unemployed, however it may also appeal to those in class D - working class, as the target age of my magazine is from student age to an age where a lot of people this age are likely to have jobs, therefore falling into the category above.

I created a survey monkey and asked my target audience a few questions that would hopefully give me a better understanding on what my audience want to see in a new rock/music magazine.
I started off by asking their age and 100% of people answer 16 - 18 which means they are right in the middle of my target audience, making them a reliable source of information and meaning that their opinion will be useful.

I then asked what genre of music they listened to and enjoyed the most and 100% of them answered with rock, which is ideal as this is the genre that my magazine will be based on. This means that the results they give me will be valid and reliable as they know what they look for in a rock magazine whereas people who like pop music for example will not know much about rock therefore will not know the common conventions of a rock magazine and will not know what they look for in one.

100% of the people I asked said the factors that would make them buy a magazine if they saw it on the shelf in a shop were the main image, feature articles/teasers and certain band names/photos featured on the magazine front cover. This tells me that I must be careful and precise when choosing what images and band names I put on my front cover as this is the convention that will draw the largest audience in. If I did not do this survey I may have been inclined to think that the masthead was the most important part in choosing whether to buy a magazine or not and put more thought and careful analysis into choosing the right masthead when in reality this is the least important thing.

A factor that is not entirely useful that I discovered from this survey was that 100% of the people who answered were females. This means that there may be a biased opinion on what my audience wants in a magazine as males may want something different but overall it doesn't matter too much because there is no gender specific conventions on my magazine.