[TASK 1] Defining Audiences

 Quantitative audience research

Quantitative research is about asking a variety of people for their opinions in a structured way so that you can produce hard facts and statistics to guide you to get solid statistical results. There quite a few organisations that publish their ratings for particular radio, TV and magazines . These are called BARB, RAJAR and ABC.

BARB does quantitative audience research to determine statistics of how many people tune in/watch a particular programme on television:

The figures which are shown in these images above, determine roughly/exactly how many people are  watching a particular Television Show, it does this by showing the progam itself and the figures of people who were tuned in on that particular day. The producers look at the patterns of views how many people are watching the programmes to get an insight of whether it’s good or bad; What they should change in orderto gain views and to appeal to a wider audience and appeal to the viewers who were nonchalant at first. Some organizations use a technique of gathering data about viewers from their programmes and create a target audience of the majority of  audiences and then based the new programme around their findings. This means they would take a test on people to see what they enjoy, resulting in a hit show that would get an abundance of views. A good example of this would be Netflix & Sky.

RAJAR also use quantitative research to measure radio audiences in the United Kingdom. They create info-graphics which present their research in a graphical way, they also use surveys & table gathering.

RAJAR Ltd [Radio Joint Audience Research] was set up in 1992 to align, design and operate a single audience measurement system for the UK radio industry serving both the BBC and licensed commercial stations.

It was set up by the BBC and the RadioCentre to measure their audiences using the same system. It replaced the BBC’s Daily Survey and Commercial Radio’s JICRAR surve, Rajar is a non profit making organisation. The organisation has a continuous programme of innovation and development to meet its market’s needs.

Rajar uses a creative form of portraying results, by presenting their findings in an infographic form, the data provided by RAJAR show the basic demographic of everyone who listens to radio shows. This technique assists the radio programmers to decide how to build their station or show around their listeners, get an idea of the topics they enjoy listening to just as importantly as the music they enjoy. By Showing how many people use various platforms to listen to the radio can also alter the type of adverts that advertisers  would give to the radios. This information is vital to get the type of audience the radio has so the advertisers and radio stations can fit their products to the demographic listening to the radio. They survey how many people listen to the station in an average week and how long they spend listening.

The listening data is collected by quarter hour. Respondents are asked to write in their listening if they have spent at least 5 minutes listening to a station within this time segment.

Rajar Profile their listeners by:

Demographics

• sex
• age
• social grade
• ethnic origin
• region
• working status
• marital status
• household composition
• household tenure
• employment status

Other media

• media access
• television viewing habits
• internet use
• mobile devices use
• newspapers reading habits

 

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 Qualitative audience research

Qualitative audience research commissions with fairly small numbers of people in order to gain a complex, detailed and in depth understanding of their experiences and response to a particular subject. Just like getting information from a class of people.

Many forms of this include questionnaires in which a group of people  are given a set of significant questions relating to a certain point, where their opinions will be gathered by using a variety of answer choices to determine at the end a collective of results to set them into categories of most popular answers to least popular.

Audience Profiling

Audience profiling is a technique of setting people into groups by giving them a ‘label’ by putting them into categories it is seen as being easier to to determine results and gain more statistics. for example:

AP describes the characteristics of those who read, view, or listen to a particular medium, such as a television channel or a magazine/ newspaper.Some people use Geo-Demographics, they provide a way to classify people by neighbourhood or other small area according to the characteristics of those areas.

Psychographics

Psychographic analysis is a technique that investigates how people live, what interests they have, and what they particularly like.  It is also called life style analysis because it relies on an individual’s activities, interests, and opinions.  It is a technique that investigates how people live and what interests them as opposed to what they are.  Some of the components include:

• Magazines read
• Food preferences
• Activity level
• Hobbies
• Sports and teams followed

A  psychographic system  called VALS which is short for Values And Lifestyles, which was developed by SRI in the 1980s. VALS places U.S. adult consumers into one of eight segments based on their responses to the VALS questionnaire. Socio-Economic status is a measure of an individual’s or family’s economic and social position based on education, income, and occupation.

Psychographic research mostly focuses on behavioural segmenting, by dividing the market into groups based on no so visible characteristics, which are many of the factors that can be used in conjunction with demographic segmentation.

Demographics

Demographic analysis looks at the composition and change of a given population.  Some of the components include:

• Total size
• Gender
• Geographic distribution
• Age
• Household composition
• Education level

This usually works quite well because customers often have wants and needs that are based on these categories.

Regional Identity

Regional identity is the theory that a person’s identity is based  on the country/region that they live in.

People are also collectively grouped based on their sexual orientation, religion or beliefs.