My Target Audience and Representation

Target Audience

I need to find out who my target audience because as theorists agree, "Any media text is created for a particular audience" (Hall and Holmes 1998) who expect to be represented in certain ways through certain conventions. When working out who my target audience is there a variety of different factors about my audience demographic I will need to consider, such as:

• Class (and earnings)
• Age
• Gender
• Race (ethnicity)
• Sexuality
• Where they live
• Lifestyle/music tastes/fashion choices

My Audience Summary So Far...

Looking at these categories, my first thoughts concerning what my secondary research into existing products and my primary audience research will prove regarding who my audience are is as follows:

Age: the age for my audience is going to be 16+ because the market for a jrock magazine for children is virtually non existent because you develop a better understanding of the world and develop your individual tastes, 16 is roughly the age you develop your niche tastes.

Location and ethnicity: my main location for this magazine is The UK in the bigger cites as thats were i am likely to sell the magazine more there, and it will be aimed at english people but indirectly aimed at japanese tourists and students.

Gender: it will be aimed for both genders but steered more towards the male gender as it is rock and metal and that is more popular among males.

Class: the magazine will be aimed at all classes as it will be affordable in price.I decided this as there really isnt a correlation between you liking Jrock and what class you are.

Finally I decided to make my magazine targeted to a niech audience as there is very little in the way for 

I will also need to work out whether my magazine should target a niche or mass audience to get the most profit and highest circulation figures. 

What is the difference between niche and mass audiences? 

mass audience this is the large audience and covers popular music. a typical magazine that appeles to the mass audience is "Q" and "we ♥ music." Marxists would say people in this group are predominantly working class or lower middle class e.g. social grades E-C1. 

niche audience are generally linked with rock and indie, but it can be linked to any genre that is non mainstream, magazines such as "slayer" and "zippy" are aimed at a the niche market. usually they are seen as quite influential. Niche market magazines may have less readers, however, they can still be profitable if there is consumer demand for the product. 

My product will predominantly fit into the niche category because jrock is not yet fully mainstream. However, my long term business plan will be for my magazine to become mainstream as the genre becomes more and more popular as current trends suggest it will. 

When working out how to represent and attract my target audience it is important that I explore the possibility of using stereotypes because stereotypes are used frequently by the media to sell a product to a certain group by making them see the product will represent them. To learn more about stereotypes that might work with my brand image I am going to refer back to some of the representation theory I was taught for the TV Drama exam. 

Key representational theories that could be relevant to my media language and target audience on my music magazine products:

Class

One identifying feature is the money situation or class of my target audience. the NRS use a model called the social-ecanomic model. and the basis of it is money E.G. AB audiences are assumed to have more money and there for more influential than CDE audiences. It is important to think about what fashion and lifestyle my target audience will have because people from different classes dress in different ways and respond to different styles. To represent my target audience I will make sure my mise-en-scene costumes and make up represent my target audience by shopping for them in places my target would. 

Age

Magazine makers have to consider the age of the readership more the anything else as it is the age that determines the style of writing, colour pallet and even adverts in the magazine. There are many age related theories that will be relevant to my media language because as Osgerby said; “Representations of youth tell us little about the realities of life experiences by young people, yet are revealing about dominant social and political preoccupation…young people serve as a canvas on which debates about more general patterns of social change are elaborated,” (Osgerby, 1998). This tells us that a magazine aimed at youth cutely needs to be based on current trends as much as the reality of young people themselves. In other words, extreme stereotypes will be more appealing that representing the majority of youths who are normal, sensible and hard working because even these individuals want to think of themselves as part of a bigger political youth movement in terms of fashion and attitude even if they themselves are not proactive. There stereotypes best fitting for youth and jrock fans are the ones Hall, Hedbridge and Osgerby wrote about in 1904, 1998 and 1988 respectively. They all agree that young people are represented as trouble and respond to this stereotype but Osgerby and Hedbridge also say duel stereotyping can work, portraying youths as both, "Trouble and fun," as a mixed metaphor. I will research exiting magazines and my target audience further to find out what media language will carry these mixed metaphors my target audience will feel drawn to. 

Gender 

This is another very important area of who you market to especially in eastern cultures as the concept of unisex media is reserved for TV and movies rather than the gender stereo typed magazines. Even in  magazines pitched at women, women are represented as, "sexual objects," according to Mulvey (1975) because women consuming the magazines what to be desirable and identify with role models who disrupt Mulvey's idea of what a feminist should embrace. Males also like sexually objectified women on products because they find them and subsequently the product being sold appealing. However, it is worth also considering that women also have desires and can be attracted to a product is a male is sexualised/attractive. I might follow these ideas or I might disrupt them by using less attractive (by main stream standards) models to show my magazine and the genre are about music not the image but I will decide this later.  

Sexuality
jrock, like other niche markets like indie, is very inclusive and plays on blurred lines of sexuality through mise-en-scene. The stereotype that could link is Andy Medhurst because you could see image of, "Screaming Queens," made to look, "Awful because they are not like us" (the 'us' being conventionally straight people who differ from the bi/queer looking male music artists who wear make up etc). 

To look further into how these stereotypes can be used I am going to link the theories to some existing mainstream covers pitches at a target audience in a similar class and age bracket as my target audience. 

Representation

Youth representation is the first area to look at as my magazine is primarily for youth culture. Firstly you can look at S. halls ideas on youth representation and it can be shortened to three main points. “Youth must have excitement and if this is not at hand in the form of moral intellectual enthusiasms it is more prone to be sought in sex or drink”. This opinion is somewhat contrasting to what theorist osgerby who states “Teenagers are presented as a class in themselves” “whose vibrant, leisure-orientated lifestyle seems to offer a foretaste of the kind of prosperity that could be in everyone’s grasp”.

This cover is designed for youth culture as its main target audience. On the front cover it represents the youth by showing it as fun and the models as crazy but also something of the old school "bad boy" look about them because of the way they are dressed such as the lead man's hair or the man on the very right wearing nothing below his sleeveless workshirt, and the way that they are looking towards the camera with a defiant look on their faces. This corresponds to Dick Hebdige's statement of the duel stereo type  “youth as fun” and “youth as trouble maker.” The bright colours also reinforce the idea of youth as fun because they stand out and contrast against the dark colours that connote youth as trouble the stars are wearing. 

In regards to gender one of the dominant theories is that of Mulvey in that she states that women are seen only "As erotic objects of desire for the characters within the screen story, and as erotic objects of desire for the spectator within the auditorium.” This is something that is heavily quoted in regards to modern films and media as a whole. When you look at this cover of kerrang you can see that she is in a defiant pose and not trying to put on an attractive "model" face for the camera and on top of all this her breasts are clearly hidden and not visible to the reader. this contradicts her statement on how women are shown in the media in some respects through showing her more in a youth stereotype. However, you cannot argue that she is young and attractive and this supports Mulvey's theory in some ways. 

The next aspect I wish to look at is race. according to what Stuart Hall states there are three ways that people are seen in the media. The native, The entertainer and the Social issue. This is endemic of the way that we see people of this ethnicity. either as someone to entertain. a savage from a different place or as someone that is a large part of the social issue. Looking at the magazine Q one could argue that he is falling in to the category of the entertainer and therefor is to a small extent proving the theory of how they are represented seem more true. He is in a suit and seems to be laughing the way that the camera is angled suggests he has a higher social standing or is at least more important than the intended reader of the magazine. The laughter does hint he partly fits Hall's stereotype of the entertainer. 

Now I will move onto looking at sexuality and sexuality representation, this cover clearly links to Medhursts idea of; "Awful because they are not like us," because this close up of the Manson shows him wearing make-up and dressing in a way most straight males would not. This cover would therefore appeal to all sexualities because it gives straight males something to ridicule and gay/bi males something to relate to. 






Advertisers
Almost every magazine makes its money from advertising and only covers printing costs with the price of the magazine. So most magazines also want to appeal to advertisers as well as the readers, this means the advertisers themselves become a secondary audience.
The advertisements that appear in magazines are always dependant on the what the magazine for example in the rock magazine Kerrang it advertises the ALT clothes company Blue Banana because blue banana feel that Kerrangs readership are the sort of people that would actually buy there clothes and this is a key part of appealing to advertisers its appealing to the right advertisers who will also pay more and buy more space. My magazine would need advertising to gross a profit and if I was setting up as a company for real I would approach companies whose products match my target audience before hand with my business plan and advertising rates (like I did in my role of business manager for the College magazine) to get money from adverts in my first addition.