Audience Theories

Audience Segmentation – Marketing Strategy

A – Higher Managerial, administration or professional

B – Intermediate managerial, administration or professional

C1 – Supervisory or clerical, junior managerial, administrative or professional

C2 – Skilled manual workers

D – Semi-skilled and unskilled manual workers

E – Casual labourers, unemployed, pensioners

Advertisers segment audiences on the basis of ‘socio-economic values’ such as:

Survivors – Those who want security and like routine

Social climbers – Those who have a strong materialistic drive and like status symbols

Care givers – Those who believe in ‘caring and sharing’

Explorers – Those for whom personal growth and influencing social change are important

Maslow’s Hierarchy Of Needs –

Abraham Maslow (1954)

Physiological Needs – food, drink, sleep, sex, relief from pain

Safety Needs – security, protection, freedom from danger, order

Love and belonging- friends, a family, being part of a group

Esteem needs – respect, confidence, admiration, self-worth

Self-actualisation needs – fulfil one’s potential discover truth, create beauty, promote justice, produce order

The Power Elite - C Wright Mills (1956)•Suggested that the Media perform four key functions for audiences

•IDENTITY

•ASPIRATION

•INSTRUCTION

•ESCAPISM

Uses and Gratifications Theory

Blumler and Katz (1974)

•Sees the audience as active consumers who select and choose the media they consume according to various needs that they have:.

•Diversion – a form of escape from everyday lives

•Personal relationships – companionship through identification with TV characters and sociability through discussion about TV with others

•Personal identity – The ability to compare one’s own life with the characters/situations and explore own problems etc

•Surveillance - Information about what is happening in the World

Richard Dyer’s Utopian Theory (1977)

Real life - Utopia

Exhaustion - Energy

Scarcity - Abundance

Dreariness - Intensity

Dishonesty - Transparency

Isolation - Community

Effects Theory or The Hypodermic Needle Theory

•This theory suggests that the Media ‘inject’ ideas into a passive audience, like giving a patient a drug

• Bandura & Walters’ Bobo Doll experiment (1963)

•The Frankfurt School (1930s)