How and why does the media use research?

The reasons i believe why media would use research are as following;
to find content, to find their competition, and
to find suitable and related information on the their target audience.
Details of who its for,
how many people are going to buy it so they need to know
how many prints you would need in regards to a magazine.
distribution methods,
finance/funds competition,unique selling point,sponsors..
how much the Audience is prepared to pay.
Advertising and finding out what target audiences like within that category e.g They have to sell their magazine to the audience and the advertisers.

Audience profiling is used to tell the advertisers what there audience is like.

There is a way of labelling the audience due to the income they have in a demographic style.. A being the highest in regards to status and wealth and E being the Lowest.The middle parts are divided due to the fact that there is more people that fall into that category. They are divided like C1,C2 etc. Demographics also includes your age,gender, where you live, relationship status all in order to build up a picture of the audience.

Lewis Tucker, Ad Director- www.ipcadvertising.com December 2009
In style magazine, the company ipc southbank have made a page for the advertisers showing information on their dempgraphics. The readership is 306,000 with a circulation of 186,251. The reader profile upmarket 75% abc1 and 39%ab which shows that they have quite an upperclass audience which goes no deeper then than c1. The magazines average age is 30 years old which is also a good key to know.


The way the magazine has approached their idea of their audience is in regards to the audiences attitude and what they need within the magazine.In my opinion this is a good way of using their research to benefit their sales and audience in many ways.

another way used to appeal to advvertisers is having their own definitions of their target audience for example. Theyve created what an up market male and female feel, interests and what they think is important. This is also known as psycho-graphic values.

Social Media Research
5 August 2010 By Sean Hargrave

Speed is a very good advantage of the social networking research

It is also economic which means its good value for money

coca-cola uses facebook in order to let their audience suggest new ideas in regards to the coke brand. On this facebook page it shows that coke has 7 million fans which is also key.source http://www.nma.co.uk/features/social-media-research/3016672. article was accessed on 9.9.10