This document discusses different ways to define and categorize audiences. It describes quantitative research which uses numbers and statistics to measure audience size. Qualitative research provides more in-depth opinions and reasons through methods like interviews. Socio-economic status categorizes people based on income, education and occupation. Psychographics examines personality, values and lifestyles. Geodemographics uses location data to group people. Other factors discussed include age, gender, and whether an audience is mainstream or niche. The document provides examples of how understanding these audience characteristics helps media producers target their content.

1. How we define an audience.
By Jonah Adshead

2. Types of Research- Quantitative.
Quantitative research is concerned with numbers and values that can be quantified
or measured. This type of research allows you to get a sense of the size of your audience.
Two organisations doing this in the United Kingdom are the National Readership
Survey (NRS) and the Audit Bureau of Circulations (ABC). The NRS provide estimates on
readership and circulation figures for the print based media industry and create socio-
economic breakdowns of audiences.
The ABC produce figures on audience numbers much like the NRS does, but for both
the print and digital industries.
Some ways to gain qualitative data are through questionnaires or interviews asking
closed questions, ratings, and tick box questions.
Having lots of quantitative data about your audience is very useful. Quantitative
data is easy to analyse and convert into percentages, fractions, put into charts and graphs
etc. Because Quantitative data is so easy to format it is very quick and simple to compare
to other bits of data.

3. Types of Research- Qualitative
Qualitative research goes into much more depth than qualitative research does and
is used to show the opinions and values of an audience. Whereas quantitative data
merely gives values, qualitative data gives the reason behind these values.
Because qualitative data goes into much more detail it is presented as full text ,
rather than short values and numbers, this means it often takes longer to analyse. This
time issue is usually suffered because of the greater knowledge you can gain on your
audience.
Research seeking out qualitative data usually consists of interviews, group
discussions or questionnaires asking questions like “why do you enjoy reading?”. These
research methods are designed to allow the audience to open up more in their answer
and reveal their opinions and reasons behind their preferences.
Qualitative data is very useful as it allows a company to get an insight into the
reasons behind the statistics that quantitative data gives. When used together these two
research methods are very helpful when trying to define your audience.

4. Socio-economic Status and NRS Social Grades.
Socio-economic status is the way an individual or family’s social and economic position in
society is measured, in relation to the others around them. It is based on the income, education and
occupation of an individual or them and the people in their family. A person is placed into one of
three categories in order to rate their socio-economic status, some organisations have split the
standard three categories into more, he NRS for example use six to define readers of magazines and
newspapers.
The six social grades designed by the NRS are now used by many organisations and have
become the standard for market research. The grades are based on occupation with the theory that
an individuals occupation will reflect their income and level of education.
The social grade of a household is decided upon the head of the house, this is a method that
has been found to work quite well and be accurate at measuring social grade.
It is important for a publisher to have an idea of the socio-economic status of their readership,
as it can help them make the right decisions on a number of things. The content of a magazine will
be effected by the socio-economic status of its audience, for example a lower class individual may
not be interested in the same things as a higher class one.
It is also useful to show other companies who potentially would like to purchase advertising
space from your publication. A high end watch maker or jewelers will not want to buy advertising
space in a magazine with a low socio-economically rated readership because a very small amount
will be able to afford their products. If a company knows the socio-economic status of their readers
they can target specific advertisers they know will be interested.

5. Lifestyle or psychographics.
Psychographics is the study of personality, values, attitudes, interests and lifestyles.
It was developed by Grey Advertising company in the 1960’s when they were trying to
find a better way to understand their audience. This information can be gathered
through a questionnaire and then used to put the individual into one of seven categories
that each describe a different kind of person.
The idea of catagorising your audience in this way is that if you can understand the
type of person your audience is, it will be easier to keep them happy.

6. Postcode or Geodemographics
This is a method that uses demographic information gained from the national
census to group people together according to where they live. The theory behind this
kind of audience defining is that people who live in the same areas or same kind of
neighborhoods will have similar lifestyles and spending tendencies.
If a company is able to identify the likely spending habits of large areas then they
can easily target areas to place advertisements in to get the best exposure to their target
audience. This data can tell us where the wealthy people live and where the less well off
people live, so if your company sells very expensive products you will target a more
affluent area with your advertisement.
This data can also tell you if there is a large population of pensioners, students or if
the majority of people living there are middle aged full time employed. This information
can be useful to know because pensioners and students usually have a very large amount
of disposable income whereas full time employed individuals have less money they can
just spend.
This type of research is most useful to companies that use direct mail rather than
mass media producers. This is because mass media producers try to target huge amounts
of people all over a country rather than a few people living in one place so information
on isolated groups isn’t useful.

7. Age
When classifying audiences age is hugely important. People of similar ages often
have very similar interests, this is because people of the same sort of age usually spend
time with other individuals of a similar age and so will share their interests together.
The spending habits of people of the same age often seem to be around the same
as they are often at similar stages in their lives. For example 15 year olds may be starting
to get part time jobs so getting a small amount of disposable income and the majority 30
year olds will be working but may have their first house or even first child so will not have
much disposable income.
Media producers usually target a specific age range an this helps them decide on
content, price and a number of other things that effect the production of their
publication.

8. Gender
Gender is a simple way to classify your audience and working out the gender split of
your readership can be very useful. Males and female generally are interested in different
things and so working out what gender the majority of your audience is can allow you to
make your product more desirable and appealing to them.
If you have quite an even gender split you till have to make sure you keep catering
for the needs of both genders or make a decision to start aiming more for a single
gender. This may however push away some readers from the gender you are not
targeting.
One product that is very heavily gender targeted would be a games console such as
the Xbox 1. Although there are games targeted at females the console itself and the
majority of the games made for it target a male audience.
It is important to know the majority gender of your audience so that you can make
sure your product suits them.

9. Mainstream or Niche
Audiences can be profiled according to whether they are deemed mainstream or
niche. Products aimed at the mainstream will be looking to target a large amount of
people and cater a large amount of people. Chart music or blockbuster films are both
examples of things targeting the mainstream, they will be seen or heard by the majority
of people and a lot of people will be aware of them.
Niche audiences are a lot smaller and a lot more specific, some media producers
target niche audiences in the hope that they will capture a lot of it and so gain a good
amount of followers.
An example of a publication targeting a niche audience could be something like a
model replica magazine, not many people are interested in model making but a large
amount of the people who are, if not all of them will want to buy this magazine.
It is useful to identify your audience as mainstream or niche so you can decide
whether to include very specific content that will only interest a certain group of people
or if you want to include things that will interest a large mainstream audience.