Research - Target Audience Survey Results Analysis

By Deanna Hammond-Blackburn and Emma Hall

We surveyed people of both genders from the age of 19 - 26 and found that they were mostly interested in indie music, but some also liked pop and rock. This shows that the indie genre crosses over slightly with other mainstream genres meaning that our magazine should focus on indie but incorporate some aspects of other genres as well. The most common method of listening to music was via ipods over the more traditional methods of CDs and radio. We could incorporate this by featuring a download chart or by giving away free downloads rather than free CDs. Monthly editions of magazines were most popular with our audience, so we should endeavour to supply monthly editions of our own magazine. As most people prefer not to subscribe we should provide an exclusive digital edition or a free delivery service to our subscribers which would encourage more people to subscribe. Most people prefer the cost of the magazine to cost £1.50 - £2 or £2 - £3, therefore an appropriate compromise would be for us to sell our magazine for £2. Our magazine needs to focus on the main features, such as band interviews, album reviews, festival reports and event listings, instead of more menial features such as competitions and quizzes. This would appeal more to our older target audience who, our survey shows, aren’t as interested in puzzles and games like a younger audience would be. As our survey audience aren’t particularly interested in freebies, the only thing we would potentially offer is free downloads. For the colour scheme, both black and white, and purple were favoured over ice blue by our survey audience. The optimum choice here would therefore be to combine both and use the black and white as the neutral background/base and use the purple to highlight and emphasise. *_* We discovered that our target audience are more interested in individual band concerts than festivals with varieties of music acts and genres, we can reflect this in our magazine by focusing on band tour articles and tour dates and less on festivals. Finally, we found that our target audience shop at fairly expensive shops such as Topshop/Topman which shows how they have some money to spare and they are slightly higher class of people than those that read pop magazines. We can emulate this in our own product by using more sophisticated language and a formal register in our articles. However, most people also shop at Primark, showing how they are still attracted to good deals, therefore free content is still a good idea.