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Essay by 24 • December 27, 2010 • 726 Words (3 Pages) • 1,133 Views
An often repeated military saying is, 'know your enemy'. In the marketing world this mantra can be applied; 'know your target', the more specific and insightful we are on this, the more affective our campaign will be, in influencing a greater target audience, hence, a greater income. Newsweek grasps many consumers already; however, mainly doing so by primarily male representations, discourse, attitudes and textual features. These factors can be modified to provoke a greater and beneficial target audience. With the variety of target audiences presented already by my colleges, one may ask, which one is the best for accumulating the most revenue and reliability to the magazine while promising not to lose focus on Newsweek's primary core values?
Males with superior intellect; males with a thirst for knowledge; male in power; through these dated representations of men, Newsweek emulates a crude representation of the typical business man. These representations are constructed distinctively through the stereotypical advertisements of men in power and dominance, throughout the magazine. Newsweek has marginalized the female audience this way and some may say what women suffer is more insidious than invisibility. It is deliberate erasure.
The discourse of the magazine offers an insight to the way men think. The harsh objectivity and featureless absence of emotive discourse of some of the feature articles, highlights the objective and strong minded thinking of the typical male and business society.
The general layout of the magazine suggests masculinity, which is evident from the blue tone of the cover, to the frequent advertisements of men and men in power throughout the magazine. Statistics also show 72% of the 600,000 upscale readers of Newsweek, are male and in employment. This means 28% of readers are female; one possible option could be to influence more working female readers to the magazine, however, this is not the only likely audience that can be provoked.
The articles in the magazine show deep intellectual discourse using frequent geographical, biological and some chemical terminology throughout many of the main articles. This could prove to be too difficult and a 'turn-off' to our younger audience, however, the use of visual discourse and interesting new technology keeps a 7% hold on our younger generation of readers, to which can be greatly improved upon. Furthermore, the types of articles within the magazine reflect a strict business look and feel; with bold headlines, statistics and appearances that look quite monochromatic. While the advertisements of Rolex and expensive cameras promote a wealthy audience to an extent, the look and physical feel of the magazine does not. Statistics show
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