audience research

We have been asked to create a student magazine on a subject matter of our choice. Our magazine is going to be based on fashion around college. The target audience for our magazine will be a 16-19 year old females, who are C1/C2 on the jicnar scale. Their demographic profile will be either Materialists or Aspirers. here are some statements about our typical reader..


They would rather have a spray tan than just not show their skin.

They would listen to Radio 1.

They would rather have a cosmopolitan than a pint.

A life without a phone, make-up or Facebook would be a life not worth living.

They would rather pay double for a taxi than be seen on a bus.


Why spend mine, when i can spend yours?


They would rather party all night and sleep all day.


They would buy other weekly gossip magazines, such as Heat and Look.


Why watch a comedy with your boyfriend, when you can both cry at the notebook?

Five things we need to do to target our audience effectively?

1. Use a chatty, informal tone to catch their attention.



2. Use bright colours that make it seem more upbeat.



3. Use a Serif font with a more rounded edge.



4. We will put details about stories inside about celebrities, gossip and fashion to attract their attention.


5. The photo on the front of the magazines would be a heavily made up model.

Research

We were asked to research three current magazine front covers and analyse what we found. We used Look, More and Teen Vogue. We had to pick three magazines of near enough the same content and pick out the similarities and differences. We chose magazines which included the subject matters of celebrities, fashion and gossip. This targets a young adult audience of mainly girls or homosexual boys. The different magazines contained different colours, however they all had a running theme of pink throughout. More uses grey and yellow as their subisitute colours; Look uses blue and Teen Vogue uses orange and black. The 'stand out' colours attract a younger audience. Look uses the common Sans Serif font which is like many other magazines. This font is usually used for a more mature audience, which is Look's preferred approach as opposed to More's Century Gothic. Teen Vogue however used both Sans Serif and Century Gothic to give the approach of maturity and a less formal one. All three magazines uses well-known celebrities for their front covers, in a medium-long shot. They are all heavily made-up and smiling directly at the camera. The magazines have an informal approach using words such as 'rocks', 'bombshell' and 'wow'. They also address the reader directly, using words like 'recharge your style'. The covers are bright and eye catching, with offers for money off on spray tans and shoes, which is what the typical reader would be happy with. They have columns along the sides displaying latest fashions, shown inside the magazines.

preliminary task.

We have been asked to create our own student magazine cover and contents page using DTP and an image manipulation programme. the cover needs to include a medium, close up photograph of a student and plus some articles advertised surrounding the picture and a masthead. We must also do a mock layout of a contents page to demonstrate our grasp of the programme. To help us with the task, we were told to look at some examples of previous student magazines to give us a better idea of how to create our own. As a class, we analysed Squash magazine which was easily recognisable as a front cover due to the key conventions used, such as a masthead and a medium, close-up image of the student. We came to the conclusion that the target audience were unisex students aged 16-19. They would be C1/C2 on the jicnar scale and their psychographic profile would be Aspirers or Radicals. The magazines front cover targets this audience in many ways. The cover picture of the student features the library in the background, which shows the academic side of college. However, the student in the picture is pulling a facial expression which portrays a more laid-back approach to college life. The name of the magazine, Squash, has a fun element to it instead of something, for example, 'Books Weekly'. The main colour of the front cover is light blue which has a calming effect on the reader, whereas a harsh colour, such as orange, would be overwhelming. It also has a mature effect. Finally, there is not much writing featured on the cover, as this would not be appealing to the target audience, and would be thought of as too much of an effort to read.

initial analysis

for our second task we then had to analyse further using our understanding of the key conventions.

magazine front cover : key conventions

for our first task of the year, we had to pick a magazine front cover and then analyse the key conventions.