Audience Research

Graeme Burton believes that audiences can be grouped in two ways, socially grouped and media grouped. Socially grouped means grouping an audience based on their age, gender, race, disability, social status and location. Being media grouped depends on an audience’s relationship with the media. For example film goers, computer game users, sports fanatics, gardeners and so on. Sometimes these two categories can overlap for example selling a CD; you might have an age or gender you are appealing to but you are also targeting music fans and CD buyers.

When planning for our own magazine we will apply Burton’s Audience theory. We are going to use both types of grouping but it will be predominantly socially grouped. We have decided that our main target audience will be aimed at males between 16 and 25 years old. We have chosen this age range as we feel we both know most about these stereotypes because we are in this age category and know enough about current music trends to create a magazine. In reference to social status it will be based on the working class category of people. Our magazine can be said to be media grouped also as it is for music lovers and people interested in the current music trends and upcoming bands.

To find out more information and help us produce a suitable magazine for our target audience we will design a questionnaire and do an interview which includes question relating to our ideas and existing magazines. It will be better if we interview our chosen target audience as this will provide us with their ideas and opinions and then we can take these into consideration when creating our own.