Question Four

Who would be the audience for your media product?

The audience that I am hoping to appeal to is those in the age bracket 16-24 years of age and of both genders as I feel that my magazine can be accepted by a wider target audience because of the neutral blue colour scheme, the chosen model who can easily be related to and also the genre of music that it fits in with. I believe that this is a suitable target audience for my media product because the genre of music chosen for this magazine is something that is currently in the charts and listened to by a mass amount of older teenagers both male and female. I do not believe that this magazine would be suitable for a young audience because of the maturity of the content and also the music is not something that younger teenagers are likely to listen to.

At the start of the project I had to create an audience profile which was where I created my ideal magazine reader where it featured what sort of hobbies they have and the music that they listen to. I decided that my readers would be someone who keeps up to date with social media and has a large interest in music – possibly even playing an instrument because that way they would have a good connection with the music.

When starting to create my magazine, I did some audience research by creating a survey on survey monkey, asking a variety of questions of what teenagers who are interested in music would want to read. I asked questions such as ‘what genre of music do you like’ and ‘what sort of competitions and freebees would you like to see featuring in a magazine,’ and I feel it is important to get an input from the possible readership because they are the ones who will have read and buy the magazine once it has been created so it is important to make sure that what I am creating is something that will be bought and read.

In today’s society, social media plays a massive part in the promotion and production of media products as many are heavily influenced by what we see on social networking programmes such as twitter, Facebook and Instagram. I believe that one of the key factors that will help make a magazine successful is by interacting with their readership through these social networking programmes to help them develop their personal identity and relationships; two of the key factors in the uses and gratifications theory.  Also, on the contents page you will be able to see that I have included a QR code which will take those who scan it directly the magazine’s website where the readership will be able to interact in even more ways than the print version.

When thinking about the type of artist and model that I would want featuring in my magazine, I felt that I had to make sure that they were someone who was quite current and young fitting in with the genre of the magazine well and able to connect with the readership well. I felt that by using a young female model would be the most successful way of doing so because both the males and females would be able to connect with her. Girls would be able to do so because they would feel like they are able to connect with them on a personal level over typical ‘girls’ problems’ finding her inspiring, and also, boys would feel like they could connect with her because she might be a good singer and is attractive. I decided to choose a close friend of mine to feature in my magazine as I felt that it would be easier to work with them and get better pictures, but also because I felt that she had quite a unique sense of style and was not someone who was to ‘camera shy’ making it easier for her to connect with the magazine, therefore I hope it would make the audience feel more at ease with the model.

The psychographic group that I hope my magazine will appeal to is the reformers, these are people who put their quality of life over materialistic items which I believe is important because not everyone believes that materialistic items and money are important; especially at a young age as they are most likely going to be in further or higher education studying for A-levels or a degree at University so will not have a lot of disposable income to them.