EVALUATION: How does your media product represent particular social groups?

My music magazine represents particular social groups in a number of different ways. As I have stated in previous posts, the primary audience for my magazine is a young adult (20-30 apx.) who care about how they look and who are into technology as well as cars and health. This particular social group would probably be seen as the average male who is interested in rock and who likes to read magazines.

My music magazine (Axel) represents this by featuring articles that possibly people with a certain social status may be interested in or just a general interest on the topic. The colours also reflect the different social groups of my magazine and are very important to consider when answering this type of question. For this piece of coursework, I wanted my magazine to appeal to a professional class of people therefore I used a monochrome colour scheme across most if not all of the pages which were featured in my magazine. To accompany the colour scheme, I used the colour red on a few of the pages as this made them stand out and look as effective as possible. In some ways, this alone represented the social group of people who may read my magazine as the colour red is very vibrant yet unpredictable and has many different moods. Connotations of the colour red include: danger, unpredictable, lust, violence, love, attention seeking and many others. I believe that any other colour scheme may have compromised the points my magazine was trying to make; the fact that only a certain class of people should be reading it however others are welcome. Although this particular markband was very clear at the time, I also realised that the magazine had to appeal to another type of social class as the success rate would rapidly decrease if there was only one target audience.

After thinking carefully, I decided to include other significant features in order to apply to my secondary social group of people who might read the magazine: both females and males in their late adult hood (40-55) who were interested in music (rock prefrably) and didn't really have one unique lifestyle ie. a certain amount of money and a certain way of living. In order to appeal to this type of audience, I had to make the content within my magazine slightly less 'in-depth' and niche as I wanted the majority of people to understand the information which was inside my magazine. For example I included articles which were fairly general like x amount of tips to become a rockstar and mention of beef jerky and Sony. These three things are areas which everyone can relate to therfore the clarity of my magazine would be far greater. Additionally, I made sure that I made reference to other artists who were not best known for rock but other types of music like classical and hip-hop.

To summarise, my media product represents two bands of social groups: band 1 - primary audience and band 2 - secondary audience. It does this by using specific lexis and graphology in order to capture the readers attention and allow them to relate to the information provided.