Magazines

I had to printscreen this slide due to when I copy it back in the writing goes weird.

Who is the target audience and why?

•It is targeting people who are aged between 15 and 22 or so because of its nature. It is is aimed at people who like games enough to buy this kind of magazine.

•People who are addicted to games is usually teenagers so that is the main audience for this kind of magazine

•People who may not have a job also because they want people who find this kind of thing interesting and if they stay at home and they are male they will usually spend a lot of their time playing games

•It is mainly aimed at the male gender because it is just a fact that there is a lot more guy gamer than women gamer

The reason this is the target audience is because if you look at the front page the first thing that comes to mind is batman and that is from a game which includes violence and that is the first thing that can drag your attention towards it

They also do not use any feminine colours on the front page. The colours which they are using is Red, White and Black, they are the ones that pop out compared to the others and this attracts the male audience

The way readers usually interact with gaming magazines is that they will flick through it first to see if anything catches their eye and then they will go from the start and look through everything bit by bit. It is all about your personal preference of how you do it.

Audience Profiling 

•The kind of audience that you may get for something like this is usually 10-30 years of age and the reason behind that is because of the generation we live in now. A lot of kids play games a lot earlier than they usually would so it would interest them.


•You would look at countries such as US and England due to games being very popular in these areas.


•There is people who collect magazines as a hobby so they would fit the audience.

•People who are usually more than average gamer would read this magazine because average gamer just read information if it passes through their Facebook feed.

•Also specific social groups who have their own sociolect exclusive to people who may play games

•You would also look at the genders and by the graphic at the side from this site the gaming industry is not fully dominated by the male population. It is also 40% women.

•You can also see that US is dominated with people who play games so the main audience could be US.

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Codes and Conventions 

•On this magazine you have the eye catching image of batman to catch the readers eye.
•It has information which says what is inside the magazine. They have this to encourage people to read it
•They have a preview of what is inside the magazine on the front page this also helps to catch attention.
•A sub heading under the main heading which says “batman” they put it in bold in order for it to grab someone’s attention by putting the most known bit of information on the front page

•The location of the front page is dictated to gaming also because it is somewhere in the sky with the batman logo behind it. The location of something may tell a lot of what it is about. They have used that because batman is featured in a game in the magazine.

Contents 

•The content which is inside is always aimed at the target audience which they use and in this magazine it is just gaming so it is aiming its product at people who are interested in games.
•They stick a lot of information onto the first page so a lot more people might take interest because not everyone is interested in the same thing.
•It also has reviews in the magazine and they are there for people to take interest in making a purchase into the game. It is all there to sell the content inside of the magazine
•They may have exclusive interviews inside of it which people may take interest in and that could make the correct audience take interest.

Formal or Informal

•The magazine is not that formal due to the audience that they sell to. A huge part of their audience is children so if they see something that is formal such as a structure of a sentence it may turn them away from buying the magazine and that is why they use sentence structures such as “First look, The shooter wil real bite” that is aimed at the social groups who play games because of the certain words they have used in order to sell the magazine
•The kind of font which is used on the front screen is also a big tell to if it is formal or not formal and by the kind of funky font that they have used it is not formal. They have used fonts that arent normal and boring to look at
•The colours that are used also help you to figure out if the magazine is formal or not, they have went with a wide variety of colours such as blue,white,red, yellow and black because boring colours are not attractive to a gamer audience.

Car Magazine

Audience Profiling




•The main audience for this kind of magazine is people who love cars and are willing to buy a magazine to read about them.

•The target audience is usually male because they are a lot more interested in cars than women are

•As you can see by the front page of the magazine is that it has a sports car on it and that can tell you what kind of magazine it is the instant you look at it.

•It could also be aimed at people who have spare money to waste on cars such as this due to on the front page it is telling you the price of the car and that indicates it wants you to take interest in the car. In the bottom corner it also has advice on how to buy cars at certain prices.

• The age group for people who would buy car books such as this is estimated at around 35+ because they have been working for a long time so they may have money to waste on buying cars such as this.

•You may also get collectors who collect old cars, sports cars and so on and that is usually people of the older age.

Codes and conventions

•The car on the front of it helps because it attracts the correct audience that they are trying to sell to.
•It also advertises to people who may not have as much money because it talks about used cars in the bottom right corner and that makes the audience much bigger.
•The colours that they are using also are a big part because they all match to the car which you see on the front cover
•The layout which they have used provides a lot of information on the first page of the magazine so more people may get interested
•The words “special” which are used on the front page attract the audience also because they may think this is a one time offer
•Also they use a friendly layout of the page so aren't afraid to pick it up and buy it without thinking they will get confused. Because its friendly to the audience it attracts more people. 

Content

Here is a page out of one of their magazines and one piece of content that they do is car reviews/comparisions which extends to the people who want to know more about certain cars because it interests them or they may be considering buying one and this.

There is also the other part of the audience which are just interested in the cars in general and not the exact specifics. Because they have a stretched audience it allows them to sell more because they provide different kinds of content

And because they also cater to people who can not afford the sports cars they also feature family cars and average cars to make their audience even bigger. and if you compare the audience from this kind of magazine compared to the previous one this has a much more mature look to it because it caters to the older audience and older audience are much more familiar with this kind of layout of content compared to the one which was shown above.

Formal or informal?

By the front page you can tell that it is mostly formal but it does not go too far to make people not want to pick the magazine up. What also adds to it not being formal is how they have used the colours to bounce off each other so people are not afraid to pick it up and give it a read.The reason it is also formal is because they do not use certain words that may be only known in certain social groups and so on. They make it so it is understood internationally

Also another reason which it is formal is because of the audience that it caters to. It caters to a more mature and older audience and the reason I know this is because one of the aims of this magazine is to get you interested in buying one of the cars which it showcases in the content of the magazine and the older audience is not used to the informal way of typing and the slang which is sometimes used in more informal magazines. 

If someone who is interested in this type of magazine reads the magazine about games it may confuse them due to the references and slang that is used and the same for the opposite way around.  The formality of this magazine has a big impact on what audience it is overall. 

A quote from one of the print screens above says "Lambo shows hybrid tech in 898bph GT" and this shows that not everything is formal but everyone knows what the word 'lambo' means.

Also the layout also dictates the formality and as you can see everything is simple and compact they have everything in certain areas on the page so it is not jumbled around and confusing to read. You can tell when the subject is different because it has borders around the text but if you look at the other magazine has no indication when it is talking about a different subject because they do not have any kind of border to signal it is something else but this is okay due to the audience.

Audience Feedback

There is different ways that companies may get audience feedback to improve their product such as

•They can use social media because it is the biggest place that a lot of people have access to at once. They can voice their opinion on sites such as Twitter and facebook
•Companies may use trials for their product. They may release a certain quantity and see how long it takes for that product to sell all of it and that gives them a lot of information such as is there pricing correct and are they aiming at the correct audience
•They will also use social media sites for complaints and that can give them a good idea of what their audience wants and doesn’t want
•You can also use focus groups, when a group of people get together and give feedback about the product in order to come up with something that will improve
•You could use social media and focus groups together because you can get a list of what people on social media want and bring it into a focus group of people who can get these things done.
•You can also use sites such as reddit where a lot of people also voice their opinions

As you can see companies may get a lot of their feedback online and this is due to because of how efficient the internet is because it is free and you can get feedback just from a simple comment from someone and you get numerous sites that you can get this kind of feedback from. Not just one site 

One of the disadvantages you may have if you get feedback online is that sometimes you may get fake feedback and in some cases this may be took serious and therefore may lead the company in a whole different direction in what the audience may want but if you do it face to face you could get more direct and honest feedback on how to improve your product.

You can also do tests which you can get feedback from and this is when you release a certain amount of magazines at once and you can get feedback from these magazines and through the internet or face to face and this is a good way to figure out if your product is good to go or if it needs improving. It lowers the risk of having an unsuccessful product.

This is why having feedback is key to improving your product because you can figure out what you are doing and if it is the correct step to go or if it is not because you can't have a successful product if you do not know what your audience wants.