evaluation question 5

How did you attract/address your audience?

There are a few ways in which a magazine can attract an audience, it’s important that when you aim it at a specific group, you aim it at their needs and interests. If you want your media product to be successful then you need to pick the right target audience and make sure they connect with the magazine; this can include the price, plug and competitions.

The price of your product is one of the main factors a potential buyer will look at before deciding whether to buy your magazine or not, this means that you should do some research into the ‘social class’ of your genre, for example my genre is Reggae, from my research I know the ‘class’ of most of my target audience is ‘lower class’ which means I needed to adapt my product to suit the needs and expectations of my audience, I did this by making the price lower, altering the plug so it had some relevance to ‘the lower class’. By adapting the price towards the audiences needs it’s more beneficial to you and the audience.

The image on the front cover contributes massively to whether somebody (a potential buyer) buys your product, what I mean by this is that the model who you’re using as your main image needs to be relevant to the main feature story (the topic). If someone is browsing through magazines in a shop and they see the artist on the front cover they’re more likely to become attracted to it because they want to know what information you have about them inside your music magazine. In my magazine I attracted the audience by using an image of a Reggae artist who had recently released a new album, if this was in a shop people would see the Reggae artist and the caption which says ‘new album coming soon’ then they would want to know where, when and other details on the album.

The front cover in general is very important when in the process of attracting your audience, in my magazine I have used bright colours which are associated with the Reggae genre, one problem with this in my magazine is that they aren’t specific to the Reggae genre; the colours I have used don’t match with the Reggae trademark of Green, yellow and black (the colours of the Jamaican flag). If I was to do this again I would use the Trademark colours just so it attracts the audience that little bit more and makes it stand out.