The Magazine Industry Blog

Audience Research & Profiling

Magazine companies, invest a lot of time and money into researching, classifying and targeting their audiences. They do this for two reasons:

• To make sure their product is attractive to their readers
• To provide accurate data about their readers that they can give to potential advertisers

Demographic profiling

Demographics means categorising people by quantifiable things like age, gender, class, race etc.  This form of classification was developed by market researchers in the 1950s and is central to audience research but it is now viewed as a fairly limited method. Let’s look at ‘class’ for example.

Developed in the 1950s, this traditional way of measuring social class was according to the JOB of the main breadwinner of a household.  The classifications are as follows:

A         high ranking professionals; lawyers, doctors etc

B         middle ranking professional; middle managers in businesses, teachers etc

C1       “white-collar” (office) workers; junior managers, bank clerks, nurses etc

C2       skilled manual workers; carpenters, electricians etc

D         semi and unskilled manual workers; drivers, post sorters, labourers etc

E          people subsisting on state benefits; the unemployed, pensioners etc

Whilst this method is still used, it is of limited value because a manual worker (plumber) might earn as much as a teacher (more, probably). Also, it doesn’t indicate how someone might spend their income. Does the household have 10 children to feed or just one? For example. Also, it is also only really relevant to the main breadwinner in a household.  Could we, for example, talk about a teen magazine targeting 14 year old B/C2 girls? 

For this reason (among others) advertisers and media producers have turned to more sophisticated approaches such as PSYCHOGRAPHIC methods (mainstreamers, aspirers, careres/succeeders and reformers) and lifestyle subsets. These methods categorise people into “consumer personality types”.  

ACTIVITY:

Magazines gather demographic data from www.nrs.co.uk National Readership Survey and www.abc.org.uk Audit Bureau of Circulations UK. Use the NRS website to answer these questions:

1. Which Women’s WEEKLY magazine has the highest readership?

2. Are the majority of readers for Women’s WEEKLY ABC1s or C2DEs?

3. Which Women’s magazine has the greatest number of male readers? 

4. Choose 5 newspapers and try to put them in order of readership (from highest to lowest). Check your answers on the NRS website.

1. Read the online “Media Kit” of your chosen magazine published by IPC, the National Magazine Company, or Bauer.  Does the information given about the target audience’s demographic and psychographic profile fit you?  Is it odd to find yourself categorised like this? 

2. Do you think that psychographic profiling is too simplistic? Insulting?  Do you think it works?   

 

Media theorist Ien Ang (1991) calls these profiles ‘imaginary entities’ as they are more like prototypes than real people.

   

The Audience as a Product

So the audience for a magazine can be packaged up using a few pithy sentences along with some simple statistics and SOLD to advertisers.

Promise the latest fashion advice on the cover of Grazia and lots of 20-something urban women will buy it. Top Shop know this so they are happy to place ads in this magazine.

So to summarise:

Simple demographics about household income are not enough. Brands will only be persuaded to place ads in a magazine if they believe that magazine will reach the audience that they also want to reach.

If there is a brand out there that wants to advertise its products but it can’t find a magazine that is targeting their desired audience then this is known as a gap in the market and it won’t be long before a new magazine will start up to fill the gap. For example, a magazine might be launched to attract young female hedonist B and C1 aspirers! Or middle-aged male traditionalist achievers in A and B.

That’s how soap operas got started. (Look it up!)