Audience Research - Task 8 - Summary

Task 8 - Summary

In both the survey and the interview I did in my previous task results are similar. The findings I get from both the survey/questionnaire and the video interview will help me create the correct magazine for the demographic and target audience. Following the answers my interviewees and the people that completed the survey I can achieve the appropriate content for my target audiences such as informality, connotations, image to text ratio and so on.

Some trends relating to both forms of information gathering include larger amounts of people preferring more images to text and stronger colours on the covers of magazine do make a difference for the majority of people that participated in both the questionnaire and the survey.

Script for audio file:

Over the course of October, 2015. I collected research based on my peers' (potential audience) hobbies, music taste, personal opinions etc. This was to find information that will help me create a magazine that follows the right guidelines and uses the appropriate content for a certain demographic and target audience.

The information I gather from doing this audience research will help shape the presentation of my magazine from the beginning.

For instance a brand such as BBC's Top Of The Pops magazine would do audience research to see if the presentation of the brand as it is, is suitable and appropriate for the demographics they are achieving. They would then shape the attitude of the magazine to whatever the majority demographic is. This would become the target audience for the magazine. The media pack for Top Of The Pops magazine states that the average age of its consumers are 12 years old. Now it wouldn't be suitable to put suggestible images or taboo language in the magazine, because through research that isn't what stimulates the target audiences mind. As Top Of The Pops magazine practices, it uses role models and beauty as the primary entertainment within the magazine instead of mostly rock music in Kerrang!.

To find audience research for my magazine I made a survey over SurveyMonkey.com. This would explore, as I said earlier, my target audiences hobbies, music taste and various personal opinions they may hold against my magazine's inherent music choices.

Questions included what is their gender?; what is their age?; their name?; rock or rap?; hobbies?; what artists influence you the most?; do you like free promotions within magazines?; formal or informal?; stronger colours influences your purchase?; more text or more images? and if the connotations fit the genre?

It didn't occur to me when I was creating the Survey Monkey questionnaire. That the name question within my ten questions was redundant and not relevant to what I intended to find out. This stopped a different, better question being used in my survey. So when I conducted my focus group interviews I made sure to tweak this to a question that actually has some use in my research.

The first question I asked in both my survey and the focus groups interviews was the gender question. This was important because different sexes stereotypically prefer different things magazine wise. I needed a way to categorise this information of what gender preferred what and what both genders like as a whole, this allows my magazine to appeal to the majority, as well as appeal to the target audience.

Gender answers were relatively spread across the board. A point to address was that some results consisted of witty answers because a lot of the participants of this survey I am friends with and so are informal towards, having a wider sample size will reduce the likelihood of this happening. No results in the focus groups interviews contained humorous answers because my forwardness and the camera intimidated the participant to give a more truthful, and so useful answer.

In terms of people I asked in the survey, the ages of the people are relatively normal. Having posted the link to where you could fill out the questionnaire on Facebook to get a wider sample size for more accurate results. Across the questionnaire and the interview the gender split is pretty equal with the survey including 6 females and 5 males, and the interview having 3 males, and 2 females. The first audience research I conducted was to find what my audience would like. To ensure that I was going on the right track I conducted further questionnaires that asked questions about if my magazine pages conformed to the convention in their opinion. The general consensus was that my magazine did, in fact, reflect the genre I was trying to portray with 75% of people that answered the question agreeing when I conducted the Task 13 survey. Those that read the pitch, 75% of them agreed that this magazine could be successful, this is echoed by the 75% of people that agreed that the media pack gave them valuable information. The questionnaire I conducted recently after I finished all three pages asked if the pages conformed to conventions and we're appropriate for the age of the target audience, as well as their personal opinions. 80% of people agreed that all three of the pages were conventional, and 4 in 5 people believed that the magazine accurately emulated the target audience of 11-20 year old through the magazine's use of images, text and language. The questionnaires I have conducted have had great effect on the quality of my work, and I think this is an integral process in actually finding your audience.