Why and how do media comapnys use research

Things you will need to research in the media.

Target audience/ How many people are going to buy it/ Printing expenses

Who the competition will be?

Distribution and Advertisement promotions.

Financial support/ funding /sponsors- relationship to target audience - Freebies- change is prices as a result.

Content - what will the product consist of? Relate to target audience

Audience Profiling

Magazine - NME

Source - IPC.com

IPC use audience profiling to clearly describe the audience to advertisers in order to gain fundings/sponsors to help fund and support the magazine.

From the IPC website, we are shown the different areas of audience profiling used to help define the target audience to possible advertisers for the NME magazine;

Demographics ( facts and figures in relation to media research) such as -

• Key Statistics :eg Percentage of - Age, gender, social class (ABC 1), percentage of students readers, circulation of the magazine, Readership (how many people read the magazine).

Psycographics ( social/political responses found through media research) such as -

• Mobile: promotes the use of mobile technology - advertisements.
• Music and film - in relation to the target audiences and their responses to the regular music and film updates.
• Quotes from regular readers : eg- "The NME is damn honest" - NME Reader.

Social Media Research

Social media research is a research technique used to gain product knowledge and opinions using online social netwroking sites eg: Facebook and Twitter. Companies such as 'Simple' and 'Coca Cola' have used this method in order to make major product decision. For example - Coca Cola made the decsion to with draw the distrubution and production of 'Coca Cola Vanilla' in 2006 following poor responses from the target audience. On the contray 'Simple' used social media research to request opinions on future products which lead to the introduction of new lip balm products which appealed to their target audience. The advantages of social media research is the speed at which responses are recieved and action can then be taken. As well as this the technique is incredibly cheap in comparison to other research techniques.