Target Audience

Defining my target audience will be key to my research as i cannot make any decisions about presentation, fonts, mastheads, colour schemes or any other important parts of the magazine cover without knowing who i am aiming the magazine at. After looking at a few examples of exsisting indie style magazines i have decided that the target audience for my magazine will be girls aged 16 and over, most of the indie magazine that are in shops at the moment are aimed at both boys and girls of a usually older audience. It is also very important to me that i represent all areas of indie through imagery and text within my magazine. Although my magazine will be aimed purely at females i do not want to over-do the cover with bright pinks and stereotypically 'girly' features as indie colours and more neutral instead of bright generally. Another thing that i will have to consider is the size of the magazine, all current indie music magazines are A4 size, this makes them easy to flick through and enables for alot of information on each page, however, recently some fashion magazines have been printed onto A5 pages, this makes them fit well into handbags which may come in handy as my magazine will primarily be bought by females. All of the A5 size magazines are aimed at women as the smaller size would not work well with mens hands as they are normally much bigger. To help me decide what size to make my magazine i asked 30 girls from the target audience age range which sized magazine they prefered, out of the 30 girls only 6 say they preffered the smaller sized magazine with comments such as 'its so easy just to pop in your bag for the bus' and 'i really like the more petite magazine as its really easy to hold when your lying down in bed' on the other hand the 24 gilrs that preffered the A4 sized magazines said that they find the smaller versions to fiddly and the writing 'barely readable'. After talking to these girls i have decided tat my magazine will be printed onto A4 pages, this will allow me to hopefully fit more information onto my double page spread. I will also have to decided on the age and gender of the person that i will be using as the cover star, an 18 year old boy is likely to attract the eye of the girls but a teenage girl is also likely to grab there attention as they may see it as somebody to relate to. I will also have to decide what text will help to attract my target audience, i can use up-to-date slang words to help the readers really connect with the magazine and therefore hopefully boost sales. I will also have to consider the positioning of the magazine in the shops, as teenagers do not generally spend alot of time in newsagents and paper shops, it would be a sensible idea to position the magazine at eye-level so that they will hopefully see it as they walk by, a striking masthead should also help to achieve this. During every decision i make i will have to consider my target audience because every single piece of the magzine needs to appeal to them because without them the magazine will not sell.