Research

Research

Analysis of existing products

I analysied some existing products in order to allow me to create a magazine which follows the codes and conventions of a magazine. 

I am hoping to create a magazine with a similar look and genre to Kerrang. This falls into the rock genre. To do this my magazine will need to have a almost "messy" layout, being quite busy so that little white space is left.  

The connotations of colour in this contents page are of rebellion and danger. The red connotes danger and passion, two common desires for a teenagers, the target audience for Kerrang. They go for the psycho dynamics of explorers, young peoples wanting new experiences. The yellow adds to the red, gives the connection between fire, fire which connotes anger and a "firery personality" two things exploring teens like to have. 

In a normal contents page the users expectations are for a range of images, and for the articles to be divided into sections. This contents page does just that, with titles and subtitles to divide the sections up and allow the reader to find specific articles they are interested in quickly and efficiently. 

The fonts are wacky and alternative, giving the page an edgy look. This connects to the explorer target audience as they like alternative and new looks. 

The editor even has a small sections where she has wrote her word for the edition. This makes the reader feel they have a connection with the magazine and the team that create it. It almost gives that "buddy" feel and creates and sense of community, and helps the need Maslow identified of social interaction and belonging. 

This contents page, in comparison, is very different. This magazine is a pop magazine, aimed at mainstream young teenagers, mainly girls. 

The first thing that makes this target audience so painfully obvious is the colours. Bright blue and orange are often associated with the beach, giving connotations of sunshine and joy and tweens running in and out of the sea like One Direction did that one time, and lying on the sand giggling of their celebrity crush. The colours in them self, although they aren't the only thing to lead to such a strong target audience, attracts the types of psych dynamics this magazine is looking for. 

The magazine itself is clearly called "we <3 pop" the use of emoticons is often associated with young teenage girls, with their "text chat" and shortening every remotely common phrase or sentence into letters. like "hey how are you today?" suddenly becomes hhru2d, which quite frankly makes absolutely no sense to the rest of us. 

The fonts used are fun and bubbly, with applied neatly to the rest of the themes of the magazine, with strong themes of joy, youth and excitement over every attractive male singer ever.

This contents page is different to Kerrang's also because it leaves much less room for the actual contents of the magazine and is mainly taken up with the editors note and pictures of all the celebrities featured in this edition. This works because most of the target readers will want the magazine because it has an article on someone they like and by seeing and clear picture they will, obviouslys "duhhh", have to buy a copy and cut out their love and frame it on their wall. 

The colours, connected strongly to the band itself, also have connotations of anger, darkness, having a mysterious dark side to yourself. The teenagers this magazine is aimed at like to think of themselves as having "another side" to themselves. The music is all about the lyrics and the emotion, and a band having colours to show the emotion rather than just to look pretty would be appealing. 

The titles is slanted, with grungy and almost rebellious fonts. The slant shows rebellion, the refusal to do the normal magazine thing of neat and straight and all tidy. This is appealing to the teenage audience the magazine looks for. 

The images are in sepia, making the red stand out more. This makes the singer look dark and mysterious, the look the band clearly aims for. Even the shots scream rebellion and a brooding soul. The shot of him singing, almost looking like he is crying or shouting or scream, with a lot of emotion going into his songs (going back to "lyrics not pretty" ideology of the target audience) and in the main image he has his dark hair flipped and covering his face, which is a stereotypical shot of a dark mysterious guy with inner turmoil

. This double page spread is from a different magazine than the pop one. This magazine appear to be aimed at slightly older audience, with neater layout more associated with adults due for the stereotype of their need for organisation, like when your mum shouts at you for having a messy room, they need things tidy and this magazine is very tidy. 

Although Lady Gaga is not associated for her 'neatness' or conformity, this magazine has taken a good ol' crack at making her fit with their look and appear neat. They have made the image black and white which immediately takes away some of her natural rebellious look. The shot is clearly from a shoot, instead of live, which means it has a blank background. This makes it slide in nicely with the blank background of the article.  This means the article on the whole appear to become one, rather than two half's or broken into pieces of image and text. 

However, the magazine cannot appear to be boring, it needs something else, a USP (unique selling point). So it has gone with a large translucent red L in the centre of the text, unassumingly standing for Lady Gaga. This is quite a standing colour, bringing the article to life and forcing the attention of the reader to the article.  

This is an analysis of an article, although I am not creating an article strictly I am doing a double page spread which will have an article. 

The magazine industry

The media industry: magazines and mental health

It can, at times, be a very controversial topic, discussing media, magazines, the promotion of "the perfect body" for both men and women as well as subjects such as photo shop, airbrushing and objectifying human beings. The magazine industry strive to sell and make money; they do not strive to help young teenagers feel better about themselves. It is common knowledge these days that no matter who you see pasted on you local billboard - they will be edited to perfection. The thing people tend to forget (or ignore so they can blame "society" and "media" for their low self-esteem) is that these people aren't real they're just creation of the magazine industry in order sell items. No one wants to buy a magazine with a picture of Katy Perry's face on it with a giant pimple staring at them. No. We hate media and the perfection it promotes, yet we love it. We desire to be like them, know we can't, and blame our issues on it.

The magazine industry is made to show the people everyone wants to be like, save the photos of the uglies for photographers, let them put meaning to it about self confidence and actualisation. Some people aren't pretty, no one is as gorgeous as the ladies and men we flip through in our weekly photo-shoots of our favourite models and celebrities. We're not all Olivia Wildes. I for one certainly would not post a picture of me all over the country if I still had all my blemishes on my face, that doesn't mean I am not confident, or that I lack in esteem (trust me I don't), it's because a photo is a captured moment, however you post it and whatever is in it is there, in that still form, for anyone to glance at or examine for as long as they like whenever they like. It needs to be perfect so people want to stare at it, it is how we sell magazine. If we let the magazine industry, or media in general, run dry and slowly crumble away because a few angsty opinuated teens say it's wrong and makes them feel like rubbish, then our entire economic structure will collapse. We depend on media, whether that be god or bad - it is true.

In my magazine I will be using photo-shop, I will be air brushing and I will get rid of blemishes, make faces and bodies thinner and lengthen necks. It's what magazines do and have, I am not breaking that element.  

The magazine industry

The magazine industry is dying. No one can deny that. It had it's time and now it's fading just as many mediums are due to the boom in technological development and technology basically taking over the world. People are not as interested in reading off paper anymore when they can find new online, or read books from their kindle. It is sad but it is true. Maybe, however, the magazine industry just needs that little extra boost in order to survived this technical era. It's about giving the paper form of information something that the internet and technology can't give you.

Distributors: 

Here I looked into the people, or the companies, that actually distribute out magazine, I looked into 2 quite different ones and summaries my research into this nice little comparison page. 

Questionnaire 



This is the rough draft of my questionnaire, the actual one is the same without the repeated question and a space between "pay" and "for." 

RESULTS: 

From left to right: do you read music magazines? do you enjoy rock music? Would you be interested in a rock music magazine? 

These results show me how much of the target of the population my magazine will even have a chance with. As mentioned before, the magazine industry is a dying one, a fact proven by these results. However these results also show that there is still a gap for magazine to come back with a large majority saying maybe. These results also clearly show that rock music is a very popular genre meaning my magazine always has that factor to rely on. 

From left to right: If yes what is your gender? how old are you? How much (in £) would you be willing to pay?

These results show me who my target audience needs to be. A clearly we can see I need to aim my magazine at males aged 16-18. I also need to keep my price low as people of this age group often don't have much money. 

This research will help me look into who I want to aim my magazine at, which at the moment appear to be young rebellious teenagers. The research is a useful tool in creating magazine so you can know what your target audience wants from a product like yours.