Media Researcher Article

With many years of experience from working for Grazia, a high fashion magazine for women, I have been asked to write an article explaining my day-to-day job as a media researcher. At the start of my career, I was a fashion intern where I did a bit of everything from editing and page designing to organising the advertisement space. Later on, I went down the route of fashion marketing by designing advertisements, promoting fashion shows and also looking at online fashion blogs and forums. In order to make a newspaper or magazine successful, it is vital that research is done using audience research, market research and production research to gather fresh and up-to-date ideas to keep up with society and to appeal to the readers.

Our principal priority of the audience research is to identify our target audience by using a range of research such as observations and experiments to narrow down the type of people who like to purchase Grazia. It is important to do this research as the information gathered enables us to improve our magazine for the audience, allows us to directly target readers and maximise sales. It’s great to have an audience or reader’s perspective as we make the magazine for them and they know what they want in the contents of the issues. One form of research we carried out was self-generated research by holding Vox Pop interviews with people in high streets such as Croydon, Sutton, Oxford Street, Westfield Stratford City and London. To begin, we started interviewing men and women who fitted the category of 17-50 year olds so that we covered a variety of people. Beforehand, we planned questions we were going to ask the citizens for example how old are they, what area are they from and where do they currently live, what they like to do in their spare time, where and what do they work as which are more personal questions to find out their likes and dislikes. Once we had filtered the interviewees, we looked at the audience demographics by focussing on particular sections of the population of London. I believe it is essential to ask questions about mediums for example, what magazines do they read? How do they read the magazines? Do they read in magazine form, online or as an app? This is essential because it enables us to stay up-to-date for example using phone apps and also it can reduce the amount we spend on printing magazines. Once we had gathered this information, we did a geodemographic analysis, comparing the similarities of the people who live in the area we wanted to target, London. We chose to target those who live or commute into London, as fashion in London has been declared the world’s top fashion capital of 2011 and it is evident that this is where we will be able to sell the best. All of the qualitative research enabled us to build an audience profile so that we could meet the interests of our target audience.

Selling Grazia is an important aspect in order to be successful and this is achieved by carrying out market research to gain feedback about our previous articles. Market research is research that gathers and analyses information about services from the producer to the customer. To get these results, the team and I set up a focus group and planned a questionnaire for the interviewees to complete. The participators were seven females ranging in age from 18-35 years. Their occupational status varied between part-time jobs and full-time jobs, so we did not invite unemployed women as the magazine is aimed of those who are up-market and who are high spenders of beauty and fashion. Selecting a particular type of person is vital because if I had invited men to the focus group, the information I would have collected would be useless, as men do not generally purchase Grazia. The primary research helped us compare the leading UK magazines to Grazia such as, Heat, Look, Elle and Cosmopolitan and we asked them specific questions like, ‘How would you compare Grazia to these other magazines?’ I believe that it is important to ask exactly the same questions so that you receive an accurate answer that you can compare with other responses. I chose to carry out competitor analysis research because these magazines target similar readers and write for similar purposes and therefore they are our competition. Advertising our brand using many different mediums has shown to be successful as people are more likely to see them around. Again, we compared the magazines by watching their adverts. This included showing the focus group each advert, posters, online banners and then asked them what colours, images and styles would capture your eye? When trying to find information from data gathering agencies I used BARB, an agency that measured viewing figures of television advertisements in order to see what channels the nation is watching. When I discovered this information by doing secondary research, I was then able to plan where I wanted to broadcast the Grazia advert and sum up budgets. As an example, ITV2 would be a suitable channel to broadcast the advert on as it is specifically for the niche of a young audience. Doing this quantitative research enabled us to discover the circulation figures compared to other leading UK magazines. I was able to retrieve this information from websites such as Press Gazette that displays the figures and statistics for a period of time and media directories like Ulrich’s Periodicals or SRDS Media Solutions. In the first six months of 2012, figures were recorded that Grazia magazine sold 180,769 copies, Elle sold 175,219 and Vogue sold 194,406. This way, we were able to keep track of our competitors and their progress.

Production research is researching a product or a service in order to gather information that you can use. On a regular basis, I carried out production research with my team so that the contents of the magazine were very current and modern. Furthermore, we searched for many publishing companies through the Internet and directories that would publish the magazine and once we had chosen an adequate publisher, we discussed marketing and promotion ideas to help the magazine sell better. Not only do you have to think about the sales, you have to consider the contents of the magazine for example, being cautious when writing an article by trying to avoid plagiarism, knowing and abiding by the copyright laws. Personnel research is recruiting and hiring people for a particular job for example I would do this research when finding models to photograph and successful female celebrities and male celebrities that women adore. Not only this, but I would do personnel research for people to go to fashion catwalks to note and sketch the latest trends. As a fashion marketer, I researched for locations such as photography studios in London or local areas where we could photograph models and celebrities that have dressing rooms, some photography equipment and perhaps hotels close by for the models to stay in and I carried out this process for interviews as well. Budgeting for the company requires all of the information gathered. When I was summing up the budget, I had to consider, booking models, cost of advertisements, buying clothing and footwear to photograph, printing and much more! An example of this is printing. I used to print the magazine’s glossy and from the quantitative research I had collected on approximately how many people buy Grazia a month, I was then able to decide on how many I would need to print. On top of this, I would search into a range of companies and looked for the best deal that was still high in quality for example companies such as, Mixam. Their offer for 25,000 magazines for one month totalled up to £17,894.

To summarise, the job of a media researcher is crucial for a media company to be successful as I believe researching, knowing and taking into account the reader’s opinion helps us to become more popular, current and successful.