Target Audience Overview

Having the right target audience is a very important part of advertising a product. Making sure I am aiming my game at the right audience is something I will need to establish to ensure its success.

There are two main theories called upon in advertising. Maslow’s published paper, ‘A theory of human motivation’ which has been adapted to marketing, and theory being social grade theory.

Maslow’s theory outlined that people have a hierarchy of needs, these needs are often pinpointed by marketers who are quick to use these needs to as a means to sell their products. The five main needs, stated by Maslow are as follows – Self Actualization, Esteem, Love/Belonging, Safety and Physiological.     These needs were converted into a table of social value groups created from a study of UK values and change. The insight value group scale claims to be an accurate representation of the groups that exist in the UK today. The official insight into social value group.ltd table is shown below.

I think when it comes to gamers, the majority would fit into the disconnected or self actualisers. I think this because many gamers play games to escape reality (known as escapism) and because many other groups of gamers will play for the thrill of exploring a new place and figuring things out for themselves.
Katz and Blumler established the audience uses and gratifications theory, they claimed that audience uses media for a variety of purposes such as Diversion (Escapism), Personal Identity (self understanding), Surveillance (information retrieval) and personal relationships (conversation and companionship).
However, I do not have any evidence to support these theories, so I will be addressing social value groups in my questionnaire and finding out if I am right to aim my advertising about people in these groups.

The second theory applied to advertising is social grade theory. This theory states that depending on the social grade (correlated with earnings) is how likely they are to buy a product. For example, a student with not much time on their hands would be more likely to buy a video game than a doctor, who is working full time. I think students or those in semi skilled or manual jobs are the most likely to play video games, due to having more time on their hands.

The official social grade chart, based on social status is shown below.

Social grade will be another thing I will be researching during my audience research, this will help me test this theory and will help me better apply my product to a target audience.

Next, I will be conducting a survey, using www.Surveymonkey.com and analysing these results to see what I will need to be consider during the designing and making of my game, but also to see if these audience theories can be applied.