Audience

Demographic Profiling


Here i am going to describe the demographic profiling. All products need an audience for the institution to target and so they can construct the product to appeal to them.

The way in which we define a target audience, known as GRASS.

Gender

Race

Age

Socio-Economic Status

As the media industries grew following World War 2 , a need to identify and target different segments of the audience grew in order to market their product to 'types' of people who would buy it. Therefore, the first type of audience profiling to develop was demographic which involved grouping the audience into smaller groups based upon variables such as age,gender,geographical area,class, economics,religion,sexuality etc. This method groups people according to the lives they lead or their social or economic status.

The Socio-Economic Status is split into six different segments, which are widely used in marketing. These are:

A - Higher Managerial, Administrative or professional eg Surgeon

B - Intermediate managerial, administrative or professional eg Teachers, Solicitors

C1 - Skilled non-manual e.g. Sales assistant, Shop Floor Supervisors

C2 - Skilled manual e.g. Electrician, Plumber

D - Semi-Skilled e.g. Assembly Line Workers, Cleaners

E - Unskilled, Pensioners and unemployed

Demographic Profiling can be extremely useful when finding out your target audience, however it can also be problematic as people in such groups, just because they have the same job , income or class does not always mean that they are the same type of people, interested in the same things.

As a result of these flaws research has moved away from demographic profiling to psychographic profiling which categorises consumers in terms of their needs rather than characteristics.

Psychographic Profiling

This type of profiling assumes the audience to be complex and to have certain needs which must be gratified. Adverts therefore aim to appeal to the audiences' emotions and psychological needs. This also includes Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs which clearly addresses audience segmentation along these lines.

An example of this is Project Phoenix, which was a UK based research project.

In 2003 Emap set out to research and map the fan economy. In 2003 they did a first research study, under the name of Project Phoenix. looking specifically at the attitudes towards music people between the ages of 15 and 39.

Specifically looking at different groups within it and the attitudes and behaviors in relation to the way the audience consumes music.

It surveyed 2,200 15-39 years olds, male and female equally.

They identified four main degrees of interest in music

• Savants - For whom everything in life seems to be tied up with the music. They represent 9% of the 15-39 age group in 2003
  
• Enthusiasts - music is a key part of the life but is balanced by other interests. Representing 16% of the 15-39 age group in 2003
• Casuals - music plays a welcome role, but other things are far more important. Representing 26% of the 15-39 age group in 2003
• Indifferents - would not lose much sleep if music ceased to exist. Representing 48% of the 15-39 age group in 2003

From this we have deduced that our target audience is Females 16-24 year olds, based upon Casuals as this seems to be the most popular target audience to aim our product at.

By Lauren Pollard