To ensure that my magazine meets the requirements of my audience, I will need to carry out research, finding both quantitative and qualitative data. Quantitative data is information that can be counted or expressed numerically. Quantitative data can be represented visually in graphs and charts. Qualitative data is information that is non-numerical, in other words it is data that cannot be measured in tables.
I will make a questionnaire to gather my quantitative data and I will use a focus group to help me gather my qualitative.
The following is a picture of my questionnaire.
I asked 5 girls and 5 boys to take my questionnaire, so that i would have unbiased results in terms of sex. I have focused the questionnaire on people in their teens to early twenties, I expect this to be the most popular age range as this is the main age range for magazine buyers and i expect people older than this to more likely spend their disposable income on newspapers rather than magazines. I aim to find out how to set out my magazine and what to include within it.
As a result, in my magazine I will have lots of pictures and make them big and stand out so that more space is taken up by pictures than there is by text. This should keep the readers attention and interest. For example, on my contents page I will use pictures in some cases to display what is on some pages rather than just using text so that the reader doesn't have to read everything and get bored.
I also found that most people favourite part of a magazine was the interviews with bands, shown in the following graph.
As a result of this finding, my double page spread will be on an interview with a band rather than my initial plan of a gig review. Hopefully this will mean my target audience will be more likely to purchase my magazine as it includes the type of articles they are interested in.
I found that out of the 10 people I asked, 4 of them liked NME the most, 4 like Q the most, 1 liked Mojo the best and 1 liked Rolling Stone the best. So when I make my magazine I will include aspects of NME and Q into it. As a result i will incorporate features from these magazines such as clearly set out text and information like in Q magazine and informal text like you get in NME. NME and Q also get big bands in their magazine, so I will need to include big mainstream bands in my magazine rather than small niche ones.
To gather my qualitative data i held a focus group with a range of different people in the common room one lunch time. This is where you ask a group of people questions and they answer in detail and have discussions about their answers. From this focus group session, I learnt that people are attracted to magazines, by bright colours that stand out on the shelf compared to the other magazines. People also said they look out on front covers for the main articles in the magazine, and if they think it is interesting and they want to find out about it they are more likely to purchase the magazine. I found that people are more likely to buy magazines, if they get extras in addition to the magazine, for example, free CD or poster pages that they can put on their bedroom walls. One of the participants in the focus group was particularly interested in Album reviews in magazines. He said that it really influenced what bands he listens to and what albums he purchases.
I found these two research methods very helpful and gave me crutial information I need to efficiently target my audience and find out what makes a succesful magazine. From my results, I know to interpret things such as bold colours to make my magazine stand out from others on a shelf as the appearence of my magazine is crutial to attract my target audience to purchase my magazine.I will use lots of pictures (of big mainstream bands) to attract the readers attension and I will have more pictures than text to keep the readers interest as my target audience prefers lots of picture to lots of text.
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