Media Pack: The Source

 

With the use of media packs for secondary research is a good way of already knowing, what target market I should be aiming for and what appeals to readers, by the representation of the magazine layout with the correlation between the demographic of the readers, i.e. the source has a majority gender of men and the median Age is 28 and with a earning of 38,000, and the majority ethnicity is African American, with 26% white behind that.

This doesn’t mean as a magazine they specifically chose articles which will aim for that market, as a quote from the source ‘The Source has the most diverse audience in Hip-Hop. Regardless of sex and race, The Source captures the attention of Hip-Hop fans period’. So as a magazine, they know what there target audience is but it doesn’t change from the point of showing the hip hop scene, they carry on doing what they have been doing, because people have come to them because the dig what they are doing, not because it ‘suite them as a demographic’ do you have to change the magazines you read because of your age, colour and gender?

With the demographic, with hip hop its all about the style, and the source magazine have identified the key characteristics of them:

 -style makers

-Forward thinking

-Technologically savvy

-Entertainment junky

-highly social

-Gamers

-Fully accessorized

Even though this is been stereotypical, it helps the magazine identify what needs to be in the magazine, and as I am doing the same genre of music, I will have the same target audience so i will have to include this in the overall flow of the magazine .

With the circulation of the magazine very important, The source have shown that they sell 2/3 of their magazines on the newsstand, which shows the appearance is everything and without a good looking magazine could jeopardise the sales of the company, this means selling the magazine as much as you can with the looks, i.e. you might have good articles, but the readers don’t know that until they buy it, this will obviously mean customers will come back but to appeal to new audience and customers the front cover is very important, shown by the statistics.