Market Research

Soraiya Gihawi
We set out to explore the marketing and audience appeal of current health magazines. By examining and comparing two, this enables us to have a much clearer idea of how to appeal to the health audience of which we aim to relate to. I created a collage from both magazines to fully compare and contrast features of both in detail. Elements being compared consisted of colour palette, image content and imagery, use of language i.e. syntax, lexis, phonetics, semantics, and grammar. From looking at this, we had a developed understanding of what appeals to what audience.

The two health magazines we compared advertising and content with were ‘Men’s Fitness’ and ‘Weight Watchers’.

Weight Watchers

Men's Fitness

Initially, we decided on the target audience of each, though it being a stereotype, it was decided ‘Men’s Fitness’ was aimed at 20+ males aiming to gain healthy and fit bodies, where as ‘Weight Watchers’ was aimed at 25+ females seeking to lose weight and gain happiness.

The two contrasts in largely, however have a few similarities.

MEN’S FITNESS;

What they used –

-       Plosive phonemes.

-       Imperatives.

-       Bullet pointing for impact.

-       Images of muscular men.

-       Technical vocabulary choices (predicting the readers already have a small understanding of the topic).

-       Imagery of war and violence.

-       Semantic fields of violence and pain ‘Power’, ‘Survival’, ‘Achieve’.

-       Facial expressions including serious/ determination/ pain.

-       Nature ‘Great Outdoors’.

WEIGHT WATCHERS;

What they used –

-       Phonetically soft

-       Floral imagery

-       Happy and healthy – ‘real’ women

-       Bright and colourful; yellows, pinks, reds e.t.c.

-       Repetition of personal pronouns ‘You’ (also emphasized by syntactical placing).

-       Semantic field of indulgence and care e.g. ‘hope’, ‘loving’, ‘luxury’.

-       Nature/nurture.

-       Happy facial expressions, smiles.

The two had various similarities, though in some cases portrayed in very different ways.

BOTH;

-       Imagery of nature.

-       Aesthetically pleasing food dishes.

-       Images of people working out.

-       Technical language but neither lexically dense.

-       No/lack of cartooned images

-       Appeal to audience with connecting stereotypical interests

In conclusion, this task gave us an idea of a middle grounding of both relating to men and women who are interested in health.