Addressing My Audience

How did you attract/address your audience?


My product speaks in the language of my target audience because they are the types who like controversy (as is apparent in their lifestyles, fashion sense and taste in more 'quirky music), however they are also contradictions of themselves as they claim to be 'different', but by all claiming this they blend in to one sub-culture. Ke$ha is a controversial character because of the way she presents herself (through her style and stage presence), the raunchy messages that her song lyrics give and the outrageous things she has been known to say in the past, and it is for these reasons I thought that she was perfect to appeal to my target audience. Also, Ke$ha is not the sort of person my target audience would expect to see on a magazine aimed at them, so I would be seen to be pushing the boundaries of what was stereotypically correct for different social groups in society and I think that my target audience would see this and appreciate it. I hope that it would expand their understanding of what it means to be 'different', so that hopefully a little more diversity could be created amongst people in that group, as well as reinforcing the stereotype.


Throughout this task, i have asked a number of people I know who I would consider to be very true to my target audience what they thought of changes I made to the cover, contents page and double page spread. I carried out a survey on  10 people who read both Vogue and NME, which focused on the layout. I asked 'Do you think that they layout of my magazine has the right balance between a Vogue layout and an NME layout?'. I left a box at the bottom where they could write whatever they thought in detail, rather than just giving 'yes/no' options, as i wanted to know how I could improve in as much detail as possible to get it spot on. The general feedback was that everything was perfect, other than the contents page, which 7/10 people said was too complex and did not look elegegant enough to represent fashion as well as music. After recieving this feedback, I removed an uneccessary text, made my background white and used a more 'simple' font, just as it had been suggested in the survey.


I think that it was critical to my finished product's success that I carried out surveys like this, because sometimes your own interpretation can be different as it is your own work. Also, I do not sterotypically fit in to my target audience's category, so I would have found it hard to get everything perfect for them in their eyes without some outside advice from people who are ideally my target audience.