Looking back at your original preliminary task, what do you feel you have learnt in the progression from it to full product?

 

To appeal to my audience I looked at magazines that were aimed at my target audience already and took similar ideas. I did exactly this when choosing what sort of article to do. Magazines that read always have gossip filled interviews with someone and so I thought this would be a fun and good thing to put into my product. My target audience was young women and teenage girls, so I based the interview around education, fame, boys and ambitions. Taking this from stereotypes of girls interests. Because my target audience was also gossip lovers and celebrity crazed fans, I involved things such as scandals and behind the scenes, putting these on the front cover to lure them in.

I carried out research into existing magazines as I had no idea where to start and I felt that to jump straight into something would be silly, but to finely copy a few existing, selling ideas would be a good starting point. I also did it to see the competition, what was already selling and how I could make my magazine unique to the other magazines aimed at women so they will pick my product of the newsstand instead of someone else’s. My audience was a unique audience but I felt that any women that love gossip would read the magazines such a closer that have shocking news about celebrity break ups etc. and therefore looked at these magazines to see what my audience likes. I looked at what was selling so I knew how to make my product sell. For example, including interesting covers lines so, that they have no choice but to buy it. This also links in with knowing what works in the music magazine industry and what doesn’t. There is no use putting something on the front cover of a magazine that is never seen on them because chances are it isn’t on there for a reason. I learnt how a professional layout looks, and used this in photoshop to construct something with a similar layout. I learnt how to make good ideas great, by analysing it and putting my own twist on it. Looking at magazines you can compare them and see which text looks best for what style and compare them to my style to learn what would look best. I did this by looking at magazines such as blender, closer and ELLE.

I learnt from doing my thorough audience research that the importance of it is to see if there is a niche in the market for my product. Meaning is there a whole in the market that needs to be filled. At the moment there is a whole in the market for a young boy magazine. I constructed questionnaires to see if women felt my idea would be good and that way I could identify if they felt there was niche for my type of magazine. It helped me to decide on some of the features, for example what things to include such as free things, chart toppers, fashion, pictures, interviews etc. Also my target audience may have been wrong I could have been aiming it at completely different people. It turned out that I had set the age range too wide and that I learn after audience research my product should be aimed at younger girls than I anticipated.