Target Audience

In today's lesson, we understood the importance of customer profiling in order to understand your target audience in more detail. Customer profiling is a way to create a portrait of your customers to help you make design decisions for your magazine; it is a technique to attract more customers. The target audience is separated into different segments, which are Demographic and Psychographic. Demographic profiling is a marketing strategy which divides customers into demographic factors such as age, gender, race and working class. This technique may not be the best because it is not specific enough, for example not every male customers under 18 would want a certain chocolate bar or an iPhone. Psychographic profiling is dividing the target audience into common interests, activities, opinions and attitudes. This is a more detailed strategy which may be more useful.

The target audience is also separated into different social classes, these are groups are labelled A, B, C1, C2, C3, D and E.  The A group consists of the higher, upper class customers whereas the E group consists of lower class, unemployed customers. Different adverts and products appeal to different social groups. For example, a chocolate advert which portrays chocolate in an "elegant" way would appeal more to group A customers, but chocolate portrayed as "cheap and cheeky" would appeal more to group E customers.

As you can see, the magazines above are targeted towards different target audiences. Seventeen is a beauty/gossip magazine which is aimed towards younger teenagers, you can identify certain features such as the use of bright colours and the choice of cover model. Rihanna, a pop singer has been chosen because she is very popular within young female teenagers who listen to her music. On the other hand, Marie Claire is a fashion magazine which is aimed towards older customers who are interested in fashion. The colours used are not bright, but are more darker and sophisticated. It looks more attractive towards adults.