How producers define audiences

How Producers define Audiences

Producers define audiences by dividing them into seven different categories. These categories are:

• Resigned - These are the people who are ridged, strict, authoritarian and chauvinist values, oriented into the past and to resigned roles. Brand choices stresses, familiarity and economy and are normally an older person.
• Struggler - these are people who feel Alienated, disorganised with few resources other than physical or mechanical skills. Heavy consumers of alcohol and junk food and lotteries and trainers. Brand choices involve impact and sensation.  
• Mainstream - Domestic, conformist, conventional, sentimental, passive, habitual. Part of the mass, favouring big and well known value for money brands almost invariably the largest 4Cs group (average demos)
• Aspirer  - Materialistic, acquisitive, affiliative, oriented to extrinsics image, appearance, charisma, persona and fashion. Attractive pack more important than quality of contents. (younger, clerical/ sales type occupation)   
• Succeder - 
•  
• Explorer
• Reformer 

Audience Research

Audience research is very important for the media sector because if it was not carried out how would producers know what to produce and what people want.  Audience research in profiling audience’s gender, age, location, employment status and many more things. This has an effect on the type of things people want. People producing a programme could look at the regional viewing figures and see that people in a certain area are watching more reality TV than another region. Meaning that they could aim more reality TV at the area that are watching it the most because there is a lot of chance that the people that are watching reality TV in that area will start to watch the new reality TV show.  That is a basic outline of why audience research is important.

Audiences are profiled in several different types of ways; these are only some of them:

·         Age

·         Gender

·         Sexual Orientation

·         Regional Identity

·         Socio economic

·         Interests

·         Mainstream

·         Alternative

·         Niche

This sort of information is split into three different sections:

·         Demographics

·         Geodemographics

·         Psychographics

Here are a few examples of the different things aimed at different groups:

Age –

 You can tell that this magazine was designed completely around children as soon as you look at it because of the bright colours and the amount of cartoon characters on the front cover. This also includes a section on David Hamilton because if the children have something to read that is a bit more mature than what you will expect it will progress their reading skill.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Gender –

This magazine is clearly aimed at woman with a very wide age range. You can tell this because it has used a major celebrity on the front who has just announced she is going to have twins which is probably going to be more exciting for woman than it is men. They also have used sever different types of celebrities from A List celebrities to the royal family; this will draw a very wide variety of people into the magazine.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Sexual Orientation - 

Magazines like this are aimed at people with a specific sexual orientation, the most obvious way to find this out is to take a minute to look at the picture on the front of the magazine you can see that the two people who are on the front are woman hugging each other. Also in this particular issue they are trying to make ‘Fat’ look glamorous and sexy. With a magazine like this one which is aimed at homosexual woman you clearly wouldn’t put a picture of a topless man as the readers would not have any interest.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Niche  -

Niche magazines are magazines that are aimed at a smaller audience than for example a mainstream audience. These magazines are things like fishing, sewing, knitting and other magazines that do not have a very wide audience group.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Demographics

Audiences are profiled so that the people carrying out the research can see what types of people are watching what types of shows. For example people who have no job or only work on a night and are in the house in the day time will watch more daytime TV programmes such as Jeremy Kyle than someone who works nine till five, five days a week. Obviously niche programmes will not have as much coverage on the radio or television as mainstream programmes as there is only a smaller market for the niche programmes compared to mainstream programmes such as Coronation Street which is on several nights of the week on a very popular channel where as some other programmes are only on once a week or so and are maybe on some of the less popular channels.  

Socio economic classification

Explain

 

Producers want to aim advertising more at the social grade A B C1 because they will have a higher income therefore more money to spend. – ATTRACTS MORE ADVERTISING REVEN5+

UE

Whereas on the opposite end of the scale producers will put on advertising for things more suited to the people viewing.  Example-

 

 

AGE GENDER

·         Geodemographics

·         Psychographics

Researchers carry out their research on this information in several different ways. They can either use qualitative research (information that focuses more on the quality of the information such as a focus group or a one to one interview) or quantitative research (research that focuses more on getting the most people involved as possible, this could be carried out as an online survey or a survey handed out in the street, anything that will generate a lot of responses because this will give the researcher a wide variety of answers).

You can find a lot of different information on websites such as BARB which holds the viewing figures of pretty much every TV channel and programme from 1998 to the present day.