Why & How Media Companies Use Research

Things you would research in the Media:
(e.g. For the release of a Magazine)

• Target audience
  
• Who your competition is
  
• How many people will buy it
  
• Funding
  
• Distribution
  
• Content (figure out what you will put in it)
  
• Advertisement

I looked at TV Easy made by IPC Connect and had to analyse the way in which they describe and categorised their audience. From a first glance at the magazine I can see that it is targeted at Soap fans through the use of the bold lettering and big images of the soap stars. Knowing that in this country the Soaps (Eastenders, Coronation street, Emmerdale) have a huge fan base and are popular TV shows the advertisers know that the magazine will sell well because of the content (spoilers, exclusive information). The Demographics of the magazine states that the average age of the magazine reader is 44, predominately females read the magazine and 27% of upper class (ABC1) people buy the magazine.

Psychographics (How the audience feels, thier interests, attitudes, their beleifs)

Social Media Research
Social Media Research is a way of finding out what your target audience and the consumers want from a product or brand through social networking sites e.g. Twiiter & Facebook.
Companines like Coco-Cola and Lynx use these sites as a way to keep contact with fans of the brands group and allow them to post suggestions and ideas. These suggestions will then be looked upon by the marketers and taken into consideration. “In response to high volumes of feedback to provide handles for all in-store orders, we trialled and will implement them for store collection soon” (M&S Direct’s Facebook research project)

Social Media Research

5 August 2010 By Sean Hargrave

In my opinion i think that Social Media Research is a good way to get information from consumers because social networking is a fast way of communicating with people from all over the world, therefore the researchers will be able to get far quicker responses from fans rather then apporoaching them in another way.
Anothr advantage of Social Networking research is that it is very cheap to do. It's economic and good value for money.