5. How did you attract your audience?

From my project you can see that it is targeted at the rock/indie genre by the fonts and colours used on the front cover. However most people who are intereseted in that type of genre of music regardless of age could be intereseted in the magazine but as the mainstream rock/indie market is aimed more at the younger generations this is why I decided that this is how it appealed to this audience structure. I think that the magazine would be more targeted at girls due to the type of content in the magazine such as quizzes etc although I chose not to use the conventional colours stereotyped for girls on the front cover such as pinks and purples. Instead I used reds and yellows which will be seen as more masculine colours. This promotes residual ideology.
By just choosing rock and Indie music it can relate to a much larger maybe more mainstream audience and so lead to more profits as it will appeal to a larger number of people. This also means that there are more topics available to be featured in the magazine.

To see how other people reacted towards my final product I showed others my magazine and asked them what their initial thoughts were. To do this I made a questionnaire and asked them to fill in what they thought of my magazine from the results I could see if it was a success or not. On this questionnaire I asked questions such as whether they thought the magazine targeted the correct audience type, if they thought the magazine was easy to read and what could be improved for next time.

On the questionnaire I asked what they thought of the bright colours used in the magazine and they said that;

''the bright colours used go well with the magazine genre''

''the fonts used are good as it shows residual ideology as a more masucline feel to the magazine but is overall a magazine targetted at females''

I have tried to address the audience by using bright colours and bold fonts. In the images used props which were bright colours and used brightly coloured clothes so that it would work with the theme of my magazine and follow the genre of magazine. As you can see I have used brightly coloured clothes to match the genre of music and so that she sticks out.


To see if my magazine was preferred reading to my target audience - by this I asked whether the audience could understand the text and also if they felt that the younger audience target range would be able to understand my magazine also. From my findings I found that the audience thought that they could read my magazine and they also felt that it does connect with the particular audience type and that they thought that the younger people who may read the magazine would also be able to read it correctly as there was not any large words used in the text.
Some of the comments were;
''The magazine front cover was well layed out and so that the audience can clearly identify what is in the magazine''
''Could have written the article in columns so it breaks up the text as it looks like a lot of text all in one big block of writing which can be a bit off putting''

I also wanted to find out if the audiences thought that the messages and values within the magazine were correct for my audience type. To find this out I asked questions such as ;
Do you think that the contents of the magazine are relevant to this particular audience?
Do you think that the values are typical of this type of magazine?
From my results I found that although the audience felt that my magazine was good and targetted the audience well they still thought that it might be aimed at a slightly older age range and it might have been more important to add my quizzes and fun stuff to appeal to the audience age group.
''There is one quiz in the contents page but as the target audience can be as young as 13 it might be more useful to add more quizzes or more ways for them to interact with the magazine - more competitions, more input to the magazine by fan mail etc.''
''The values target the audience well as it follows the conventions of the genre''

When creating my magazine the mode of address I chose to use was quite informal this was to appeal to the younger age range of my magazine. I tried to make it more of a chatty style so that they felt that they could relate to the magazine better because if I used more formal wording they may reject the magazine as they wouldn't be able to follow it correctly and they would then not be able to understand the text.

Overall I felt that I was successful in attracting my target audience. When I showed a copy of my front cover, contents page and double page spread to a group of 17 year olds of different genders and social groups the response from the questionnaire I created was very positive. The majority were able to recognise the type of genre of music for my magazine straight away and were able to spot the simialrities with other magazines of this genre of magazine such as NME. They particularly liked the bright colours and how I had tried to use different colours for a girls magazine to represent residual ideology.
This response shows me that I have created my magazine well to the particular audience type and that I have followed the forms and conventions in my production well so that I have a good end product.