Demographics and Social class

Demographics:

• Demographic information is used in media marketing to classify an audience into age, gender, race and other categories.
• In media, as in all business, demographics are used to pinpoint potential audience growth and to spot underperformance. All forms of media are targeted to certain audiences.
• For example, Cosmopolitan, Woman's Day and Better Homes & Gardens are magazines that reach the female demographic. But beyond that, they target different types of women.

Social class:

• A status hierarchy in which individuals and groups are classified on the basis of esteem and prestige acquired mainly through economic success and accumulation of wealth. Social class may also refer to any particular level in such a hierarchy.
• Four common social classes:
  Upper class
  Middle class
  Working class
  Lower class

Social class table:

The social class that I am targeting my magazine at is Group D and E. Group D is for semi-skilled and unskilled manual workers, and group E is unemployed, students, pensioners also casual workers.

Because my magazine is aimed at the D and E group this means that I wont put too much information in my magazine and include a lot of images the reason for this is because the two groups are more likely to enjoy visual instead of too much information. The price of my magazine will be £2.00 as people of these groups are not likely going to pay £3 or above on a magazine therefor the number of pages will be lower than the more expensive magazines as the publishing of multiple pages increases the overall price. Some music magazines such as 'Q' magazine which costs around £4 however this we know is for higher social classes with the number of pages it has, the amount of writing, lack of images, the pages are thicker and there is a glossy front cover. On the other hand the magazine 'Kerrang' is a lower priced magazine at just £2.20 as this has a lot less pages then 'Q', more images and also included is prizes/ gifts which will appeal to the audience it is aimed at.

Free gifts and prizes are important in D and E grouped magazines because the people in the lower social classes will be able to get things for free such as festival/concert tickets which they may not actually be able to afford.

The social class table will help me when it comes to creating my magazine as it will help with feature stories as I know how much or little information to include. Also it will lead me to conclusions on what type of images my target audience will like and how many to include in the feature stories etc.