Why and how does the media use research?

people involved in the release of a new magazine need to know certain information, they find it through market research. e.g. they would need to find out:

• their competition
• target audience
  
• distribution (advertisments, how much should you charge?)
• content (what will be in it?)

it is vital to do market research, but it is also extremely expensive. It is worth investing in research as you need to be able to prove the magazine will be popular so advertisers will want to buy pages.

I looked at the information NME uses to entice advertisers. This IPC magazine have used statistics and persuasive paragraphs to prove they have a good fan base and strong audience who is worth advertising to. As well as this they use quotes from fans as hard evidence to back up their claims and make it acceptable to charge high prices to have space on one of their pages. NME claims to be read by ABC1 demographic. This is benefitial to the magazine as it means more expencive products will want to buy page space as they know they audience has money.
Someones demographic are the facts which outline the person. demographics include; age, income, gender, nationality, sexuality.
Psychographics are the audiences interests, beliefes and views on things. It is questionable weather NME should assume they know how their readers think, however clearly they feel they have enought evidence to back up their statements.
phsichographics and demographics are the media worlds way of dividing up the population into catagories. A lot of research is put into finding out peoples phsycographics and from it magazines have created detailed ideas of what they think people are really like. for example 'the upmarket woman' has many steriotypical characteristics such as wanting to be indipendant and internet shopping.
Social media research-
In the current technological evolution, social media research is growing in popularity. The artical 'social media research' by Sean Hargravedescribes how big companies such as coca cola use mediums such as facebook and twitter to do research. This has become the easiest and most effective way to draw information from a young audience. Sean Hargrave explains how this form of research can help a company save huge amounts of money and effort. ' Rather than recruiting panels in a face-to-face setting or licking thousands of stamps to send out questionnaires..... get near-instant feedback for minimal cost'. Despite proving to be extremely benefitial to companies, social media research can not reach as wide a demographic as face to face interviews.