Audience Theory

 Taking notes on audience helps to define what I can do for my audience on my magazine. 

Audience Theory

Psychographics 

• Psychographics are a means of categorizing audiences according to personality traits that influence their Media consumption. Simply it is grouping people by how they think. 

• Mainstreamers- Anyone who is into or anyone who hears about something very popular and instantly wants to be a part of it. Follow the crowd. 

• Example: Infinity War

• Aspirers- People who aspire to be rich, attractive, and/or successful. Want to own the finest things. Attracted to media texts that tell them about a lifestyle or help them attain that lifestyle. 

• Example Vogue magazine

• Reformers- People who want social change, are unimpressed by status and make decisions based on their values. 

• Example: I, Daniel Blake movie. It’s about the lack of support of people with mental health issues. They like this movie as it looks at society as something that needs to be changed. 

• Explorers- Adventurous people that like taking risks. Anything that is exciting or promotes out of the box and pushing yourself appeals to explorers.

• Example: G Adventures, travel company that have guides, tours, and activities. 

• Succeders- “The people who made it,” An individual who is wealthy and successful who puts great value in prestige. Come from great income and desire the finest things. Want to show off their success. 

• Example: AMG Mercedes. Shows that it is an AMG to amplify the expense of the car. 

• How to use Psychographics? Decide on media text upon which category it is or categories that this product will appeal to. Then identify this category and explain the reasoning behind it.

• Example: Planet Earth 2, Because of huge appeal it appeals to mainstreamers. This would also appeal to reformers as one of the episodes deals with climate change and hurting the environment. 

Uses and Gratifications

• Uses and Gratifications- A way to categorize media products by what they offer to their audience. 

• Entertainment- Any media product that is simply created to entertain, to give its audience a sense of pleasure through enjoyment. 

• Spider-Man: Homecoming

• Information- Media product that supplies information to the audience member essentially will they have walked out from reading, listening, watching, and have learned something factual from it.

• Example: BBC News. 

• Personal Relationships- Any product that allows people to improve or build upon any friendships or relationships they have with their peers

• Example: EastEnders- Watched this with friends, talked about it, bonded over it. 

• Personal Identity- Any product that allows someone to reinforce their own sense of self, their own identity, by consuming it or making other people aware that they have consumed it.

• Example: Personal music collection- Someone who looks at that collection could glean some info. about their personality. 

• How to apply this theory? Look at any media product and identify which use or gratification is provided for it. IMPORTANT: Many products will meet multiple reforms of use and gratification.

• Example: Planet Earth 2, informs others and is also entertaining.

Social Grades or Demographics

• Social grades are a means of categorizing an audience by their income. Allows Media practitioners or designers to figure out how much disposable income different categories of audience have. (Disposable income: Amount of money leftover after they paid essentials.) 

• Social Grades- Large to low disposable income (% means people in that area)

• A- Upper middle class- High Managerial etc. - 4%

• B- Middle class- Intermediate Managerial etc. -23%

• C1- Lower Middle Class- Junior Managerial -29%

• C2- Skilled Working Class- Skilled Manual Workers -21%

• D- Working Class- Unskilled Manual Workers -15%

• E- Non Workers- People dependent on state income etc. -8%

• People tend to target A-C1 because big amount of audience and have some disposable income. 

• How to use theory? Analyze the design, cost, content, etc and come to a conclusion of which social groups the product is most likely targeting, whilst citing evidence to back it up. When creating this, consider which social grades you want to target and plan design, pricing, and content based on appeal to that target audience. Also explain why you chose to appeal to that specific social grade. 

Two Step Flow

• Compromises two areas

• Opinion Leaders- These individuals will consider themselves experts in their field of consumption or interest. They have a strong passion for a media field and will gain enjoyment from sharing their discoveries or opinion about it with others. Often they would modify the information passed on to what they believe like news.  

• Individuals in Social Contact with the Opinion Leader- These individuals will have less or sometimes even no interest in the media platform or product being discussed. They will be in contact with opinion leaders, they will gain info. about media platforms or products from them; which increases the likelihood of consuming media platforms or products. IMPORTANT: Info. provided to them is modified; meaning they gained a biased perspective. 

Active and Passive Audiences

• Active Audiences- Audience more passionate about media text. More active participants in sharing, modification, or even creation of media text. To be active you just need to have an opinion on it or just decode it or understand it.

• Passive Audience- Audience who partake in media text, but pay little attention to it or take it at face value. Kind of like background sounds while doing something else. These audiences gain gratification from it but have no opinion on it or paid very little attention to it. 

• Today in Focus: active listener shares this and tries to get others to listen to it. 

• Who are the passive audiences and in what way can they make people more active. 

Reception Theory

• Reception Theory- All Media texts were messages encoded by the content producer, to then be decoded by the consumer.

•  

• Media creator encots the type of colors, light, and font you use, etc. into the media product. Then decoded by the media consumer; they pull apart the text and absorb it and have their own “reading” of it.

• Reading-

• Dominant- Preferred reading by media creator. This is the message they wanted you to decode from the media text. 

• Negotiated- General favorable reading of the media text with some areas of disagreements or different readings. The consumer mainly gets the dominant reading, but not entirely. 

• Oppositional- Where a reader rejects the dominant reading of a media text and instead rejects the text or creates their own interpretation. For example, Captain Marvel was found to be too feminist in marketing according to some and brought an oppositional negative stand point while the movie The Room brought a positive oppositional stand point because even though the creators wanted it to be a drama viewers took it as a comedy for being so terrible. 

• Audience Positioning- Is the process of considering the intended dominant reading of a media text and ensuring elements to ‘push’ the audience towards this reading are present. Make the audience appreciate all of the elements of the film like the action or comedy elements.

• Decide what the dominant reading encoded into the media product by the media creator and then what was the position put in place to try and ensure a dominant reading and whether the dominant reading is likely or not or if the negotiated reading is more likely or analyzing is oppositional.