Question 1 - Who would be the audience for your media product?

The audience for my magazine would be a young woman interested in popular music. She would be fashionable, have a well paid job and would be interested in the latest events in the music industry. Taste in music would vary from R&B to Rock. I chose this target audience because it gave me a wider choice of design styles for my front cover, contents and double page spread for the magazine.

To allow the best possible result for my media product I devised a questionnaire to find out from other students what they thought about my products so far and if they thought it matched the personality of the imaginary entity. The results of the questionnaire enabled me to create a lifestyle profile for the imaginary entity. They highlighted the aspects of the products that would work well for the imaginary entity and those that would need to be altered to make sure they met the needs of the target audience.

From learning about the Encoder and Decoder Model I knew how important it is for the encoder to take into account every bit of information about an imaginary entity. The encoder must consider the age of the target audience, their social class and the type of media product it is. I studied Stuart Hall’s idea about the three ways in which a decoder can decode a piece of media text. While designing my media products I did everything I could to ensure they would receive a preferred reading from my target audience. When I showed my preliminary attempt at the front cover to my focus group, general feedback was positive, with only a few suggestions being made about changing some of the colour schemes and altering/shifting font style or size.