5. How did you attract / address your audience? (Evaluation)

Understanding a target audience is essential when creating a product.

Audience reception theory, which is based on Stuart Hall’s model of the relationship between a text and its audience, influenced how I targeted my audience. This theory suggests that the producer of texts encodes meanings into it and the audience decodes it. The decoding could be completely different from the encoding, therefore highlighting how important it is to understand your target audience. Every person could destruct the magazine in a different way, so knowing my target audience’s preferences and lifestyles etc, was very necessary.

As part of the youth / culture I am aiming my magazine at, I think I had a good insight to what would be popular and what would not be, but I carried out audience research in order to make sure and further my knowledge. I created a questionnaire and handed it out to a number of people, of both genders and mainly the ages of my target audience. This primary research is beneficial as it is more reliable, coming from the original source. It was also free and I used a volunteer sample in which people were very willing to answer the questionnaire for me. I created graphs of these results for easier analysis and then read the results closely, allowing me to plan to include the features that were most popular on the results. I also manipulated every feature of my magazine to suit my audience as appropriately as possible:

· Images – I included images of both males and females in order to attract both genders. Even though the cover shot is of a women, and women customers may buy it out of admiration of the musician, men may be attracted to this also due to the beauty of the cover model. The ideal self / partner comes into play here; using images of a person who is the audience would like to be like, is attracted to, is very useful. In my images, fashion was an important feature. I used fashionable make up, clothing and shoes to ensure that the magazine looks very modern and in touch with the music culture today – I included costume such as military style boots, which are popular with people who are interested in ‘indie/rock’ music. The model also portrayed a confident and careless attitude well, as I asked, which is a common feature of this genre of music and subculture.

· Language and writing style – I wrote a question & answer style article as this proved very popular in my questionnaire results. This also allowed me to use a conversational, informal tone to my article, allowing my target audience to identify with the musician well. I appealed to the lively, careless side of this music subculture with language such as “mayhem”, “notorious” and “backstage passes”. I included topics such as a rift between band members, alcohol preferences and music preferences, which my target audience may identify with. On the cover, I featured many different musical acts in order to attract as many of these fans as possible. I created strap lines with a bold, noticeable name such as Oasis, then included a short, curiosity provoking line underneath hoping that my audience would wonder what it is about and want to read the article. I also featured A LOT of musical acts on my contents page, to suggest to my audience that my magazine is packed full of content with a range of music from some different genres.

· House style – My bold fonts with cracked graphics are conventional of music magazines and suggest that the magazine is slightly edgier and more honest than some others. It also represents the rebellion side of some youth cultures very well and could attract this type of audience. The main colours of black, white, orange and purple worked well together and also ensured that they were not aimed at one particular gender (no pink!). I used bold headlines, interesting fonts and language all aimed at appealing to my target audience.

· Plugs – On the cover I wrote that buying the magazine would give the audience a chance to win tickets to V festival. As V festival features a number of genres of music, many which may appear in my magazine, this is an effective way of persuading the potential customers to buy the product. I also small images of the free posters that could be won in my contents page.