Audience Research

Here is the first part of my audience research. I used survey monkey to create a survey in order to gather information on my target

audience which I then distributed by sending the link via text and snapchat. I asked five different questions which I felt were relevant

and helpful for my research.

I decided to limit myself to five questions only so that I

could gather useful and necessary information on

my target audience. This is my first question which is very simple but definitely

important. From the answers I have received, I

have come to the conclusion that money is an issue when it comes to buying magazines. This is because they are often

overpriced while you can read up the same things for free on the internet. I

will have to choose a sensible price for my

magazine as I would like to make it as accessible to my audience as I possibly can.

I have done my second question in the style of multiple choice and here are the results in a pie chart. I asked this question in order to find out

what the main focus of a magazine front cover is usually so that I can pay special attention as to how I will make it stand out. As you can see, I

have given six different options to choose from. Half of them weren’t chosen at all and the answer which was heavily outnumbered was the ‘image

of artist.’ This is what interests my target audience most and this is what I aim to be focussing on

while creating my front cover. The image of the artist does catch your eye so I would have to make

it look aesthetically appealing by adding bright colours for features such as the lips and nails. I

could also make it look visually appealing by using the tools on Photoshop to hide any blemishes

that the model has or even whiten teeth if necessary. I fit into the age group of my target

audience and I would also have to agree that the main image on the front cover interests me most

as it can tell a lot about the contents.

This is my third question which I left open for people to express their individual ideas. I got a wide variety

of answers from this question. I can see from

this that colour is popular among my target audience.

This will help me to think carefully about a colour scheme which works in unison as well as being bold and eye catching. I can gather from these

answers and the answers to question 2 that my

target audience is very visual and so my front

cover will have to be very bold and visually appealing

in order to stand out. Cover lines stand out too.

I have also done this question in the style of multiple choice to get a clear answer to this. It

seems that the target audience find balance in a music magazine appealing. When there is both

good contents and good appearance. Appearance and layout is a slight bit more important than

contents. Again this shows that my target audience is very visual and expect to see a well

structured music magazine full of colour and good images. But at the same time also having the balance of good contents, articles, interviews, headlines, cover lines, etc. Personally, I would

agree that a music magazine should have a good balance of visual aspects as well as contextual aspects however, I feel that the visual side is

slightly more important as it is the first thing that you see. I think that a challenge for me would be making it look professional like a real media text. However, I feel that if I do further research into real media texts and the conventions of a music

magazine, it will be much easier for me to create a magazine which looks realistic and professional.

My final question serves the purpose of finding out what my target audience

want for the visual portion of the magazine. There is a real mixture of ideas here

which could help me to write cover lines. There is

also the convention of having images of other

famous artists on the front cover. I can’t do this for my magazine, but I can include

their names and news about them as cover lines. Having lots of pictures is

important for a pop magazine as they are

usually very busy and eye catching and they don’t

leave blank spaces. I’ll keep this in mind for my own.