Audience Theories

Aiming at the right audience is very important in media studies so I have decided to thoroughly research to get the most accurate target audience possible. All media products have an audience in mind, and this makes it easier for them to advertise and promote their product too, saving money. I am going to use questionnaires, focus groups, target audience theories, existing media products and more to find out the right audience for my short film.

When a media business is defining an audience to find their target audience some of the factors they consider are: Age, gender, religion, race, sexuality, education, occupation, annual income, current and desired lifestyle, media interests, buying habits, loyalty to brands. Firstly I am going to research some audience theories:

Demographic Table

A demographic table is essentially used a lot for audience profiling as it defines the adult population into sections from what work they do. It splits the population up into 6 groups, and labels them by a letter code A,B,C1,C2,D or E, this described the status of each member in the group. The Upper Class are people inherited with wealth and great power. The Middle Class are what the majority of the uk population is currently in, business people, shop owners and professionals. The Working Class are people working with agriculture, mine and factory workers.

This is the newer grading scale however and this goes with '1-8' and even the old equivalent grade in the right hand column.

Then on below this is the population of how much percentage of the demographic are in each sector.
Having this table makes it easier to target an audience so you can specifically know you are aiming towards and also when you market you can save money by targeting the right people and not wasting on marketing to the wrong.



Psychographic Table
A psychographic table however does not divide them through work titles, but this table divides them into groups based on social class, lifestyle and personality characteristics. This table has the the belief of types of products a individual purchases reflects on the person's characteristics and patterns of living. The advertising agency ‘Young and Rubican’ invented a popular and successful psychographic profile known as their 4C’s Marketing Model stand, ‘Cross, Cultural, Consumer and Characterisation.’



Researching these audience theories have been very significant. It is major to research audience as a mass audience is too large therefore these theories are breaking ti down into categories which has made it a lot simpler and easier to get a target audience.