Audience Research

It was important to find out exactly who my target audience is, to do this we devised a questionnaire using survey monkey. Obviously our primary target audience is going to be students at the college who's ages range from 11-19. My magazine is not gender orientated. Personally I think that students will be interested in events and stories that are directly involved within their school life. The secondary target audience will be parents of the students who again are going to want to know exactly what is going on within the school.

This question was simply to clarify the age range of students at the school however it was a bit vague as the people asked where simply people in my class, given a second opportunity I would of widened my range of participants in the questionnaire. 

This question was asked to clarify the gender split between the students at the college, again though the amount of participants does not give a clear representation of this, however it does show a difference which is why I did not want to make my magazine targeted to a particular audience. 

No one that was a participant in the questionnaire was above the social grade C2, this made me think about the style of my magazine, I wanted it to be very simple and generalised and not targeted at a particular social grade. I did not make the magazine cover pretentious as I thought this would of deter people from reading it. Instead i headed down a more bold and colourful route in order to attract the most of my target audience.

This question was not surprising looking at the college magazine at the school already which lacks almost every common convention out there. People are not excited about the college magazine, they only sometimes read it. This made me think that people will read it if there is a story in the magazine that is in their particular interest, however it is hard to tell exactly what makes them want to read to college magazine, when they "sometimes" do.

It asked this question in order to clarify what exactly was wrong with the magazine in order to find out what exactly I needed to focus on when designing my cover. I agree with what the participants of the questionnaire have answered. The name lacked any sort of individuality or thought. The images where of poor quality and took up the entirety of the cover page.

It was not surprising that 40% of the people simply don't read the Bodmin College Magazine. The majority of people read it for entertainment, they are reading it for the sake of reading. Some people also read it for information. I think a blend of interesting stories that are entertaining would attract more people of my target audience into reading a college magazine.

This question helped me vastly in choosing my colour palette, however I do not think the participants took into consideration how these colours would look on a magazine, colours such as pink and purple would be stereotypically a female's favourite colour which may of been their influence when answering this question. The remaining three colours when put together looked good together and are very general colours that don't represent a particular gender or age group.

This question simply backs up the detest towards the college magazine, it also helped me make the decision in whether to add a barcode or not. People may not want to pay for a college magazine as it has generated a bad reputation full of boring stories, lack of individuality and poor image quality.

I did only give three options towards the choice in name for my college magazine as giving a choice would not of been helpful in choosing the most popular name. I took the most popular option out of the choices given and used this on my magazine cover. I wanted the most popular option to be used as this would of been what the target audience wanted and would be given the magazine a better chance of actually being read.