Preliminary Task 4: Target Audience

The Primary Target Audience for a college magazine is people of any gender from the ages of 11-19. Rarely will college magazines pander to the parents of the students inside the college and but it could be argued that the Secondary Target Audience would be people of any gender and between the ages of 30-50 for the reason that it is entirely possible and most likely a consideration on each colleges part. The Social Grades of both Target Audiences are most likely to be between D and C1. This is subject to change depending on what location or environment the school is in yet it is most likely to be in this range. The D to C1 range includes anyone who has a semi-skilled manual occupation or is in a clerical or junior administrative position.

Similarly to Social Grades, it can be assumed that most of the students that would read the magazine would be in the working class although it is not necessarily always true, such as in the event one of the students families may be in the middle class or above. Furthermore, if one of the students parents were to be in a higher class, then it would be that the secondary audience's Social Grade and class would be very similar to the students at D to C1 or perhaps even D to B, for the Social Grade, and working class to middle class for the secondary audiences class. The inclusion of the B Social Grade means that those in an intermediate managerial or administrative position would be included.

The uses and gratification of the magazine would primarily be cognitive, and possibly affective, and socially integrative. The magazine would assist cognitively due to it relaying information from the college to students and parents alike; affectively as someone could feel emotively, such as prideful or excited at a given piece of information, for or because of someone or something in the college, such as an event; and to fulfil socially integrative needs by giving a common topic for discussion among students or parents. This would most likely apply to both the primary and secondary audiences.

This information lines up somewhat well with a survey I conducted from a broad range of people, yet kept to a small scale. There were a considerable amount more male than females that took this survey, were this to be reproduced it would be favourable to have an equal amount of each gender. The prediction of age being between 11-19 was very accurate as there were no results higher than that boundary. Most of those who took the survey were people who read college magazines at a ratio of 3:1 for people who do read them against those that don't. The rate at which people read college magazines is varied greatly. 2 of the 8 said they read them weekly, 3 out of 8 said they read them monthly, 2 said they did not actually read them, and 1 said they read them 'occasionally'.