In mass media today, target audiences are what magazines use to pick specific groups of people they want to buy their product. This target audience is reflected in things like the words they use, the ads they portray, the articles and editorials found inside, and even in the pictures used. Target audiences differ from magazine to magazine, but I chose to look at two specific ones: Vogue and GQ.
When thinking of fashion magazines, one that may jump to the front of the mind is Vogue. Vogue is a high fashion magazine, aimed towards the demographic of upper-class women, typically between the ages 16 and 34. These women in particular also do most of the shopping and purchasing for the house and family, and majority of them have a higher education. I didn’t even need to search far into the magazine to see examples of this demographic. I noticed that right on the cover, every name that was starring throughout the magazine was female, except for Derek Jeter. The person posing on the front cover was Rihanna, it was a picture taken of her before the Met Gala, which was labeled “the party of the year”. This is a clear introduction to the gossip that will be introduced in the articles inside. Rihanna sports a bright yellow dress adorned with fur at the top, and she is wearing a headpiece of some sort. On the inside cover I notice an ad for perfume, with a young blonde woman posing in it. Before you even open to the main pages of the magazine the demographic Vogue was intending to impress is clear. While I flipped through Vogue, I began to notice how the ads on each page aimed towards their demographic. Not once did I see an ad for golf clubs. Nowhere could I find an ad with Eli Manning, or Jon “Bones” Jones in it. That’s because the typical female in the demographic that reads the magazine doesn’t play golf, football, or watch MMA fighting. This made me want to look deeper into how specific the demographic Vogue actually is.
After looking at Vogue, I decided to compare the target audience to GQ. GQ is a high fashion magazine for men the same age range as Vogue. The magazine is geared towards upper-middle to upper class men, who work white-collar jobs. Immediately, I notice a difference on the cover of the magazine. Unlike Vogue, there are no bright, flashy colors on the cover page. Only red, which signals an emotion of power in the human mind; white, which invokes a sense of elegance; and black, which insights an air of mystery. The model on the front is Bradley Cooper, who the author has labeled a “Master of the Fashion Game”. Bradley sports an all black suit, and black sunglasses, which add to the sense of mystery, power, and elegance, conjured by the color scheme. Also, the ads on the cover for the articles inside the magazine are much different than those on the Vogue cover. Instead of gossip, the headlines talk about the outdoors and business, two more signs that give a sense of masculinity. The ad on the inside cover is a simple advertisem*nt for the apple watch. Unlike the sensual perfume ad in Vogue, this ad is simplistic: there are no people, no big words or bright colors to draw attention, just the watch with a small description. Quickly flipping through the pages, I see ads for cars, cologne, and watches. There are no ads for Tampax, perfume, hair products, or body lotion. The demographics for each magazine have dictated the types of ads on their pages.
When looking deeper into each magazine, I began to realize even smaller differences that demonstrate the target audience. For example, the wording of some of the ads, articles, and editorials in Vogue use more sensual, feminine words like “it girl”, “enchanted”, “garden”, and “cascading”. In GQ, the words were more masculine, for example “fire”, “outdoors”, “tough”, and “grilling”. Also, the articles in Vogue mostly had to do with things like gossip; what that girl wore here, this actress’ fashion faux pas, and who’s dating who. GQ, on the other hand, had articles about sports figures, staying active, and smoking. As for the prices of the magazines, Vogue was exponentially higher than GQ. This is because Vogue sells more; men like the readers of GQ simply don’t have enough of an attention span to read through a magazine every month. This also leads to the reasoning behind the number of pages. Vogue is significantly thicker than GQ. Typically, the women Vogue targets love to keep up with the gossip and news surrounding the world of fashion and celebrities; the average man does not. The men GQ targets don’t care to, or simply don’t have time to. This also affects the amount of money a typical ad costs in each magazine. In Vogue, the average one page advertisem*nt costs $157, 734. In GQ, the average one page advertisem*nt costs $82,507. That means price for one years worth of adds in Vogue is over $1.9 million. In GQ, one years worth of ads costs over $990,000. And at the end of the day, the funniest, most ironic part I find in all of these differences between the magazines, is that the same company owns them both: Condé Nast.
In conclusion, in my personal opinion both these magazines reach their target audiences very well. Not only do they demonstrate clearly in some places, like the front cover, who their audiences are, but they have places where they are subtler as well. For example, the word selection. Only when you look for examples of the target audience would you realize how different the wording in the two magazines are. Likewise, the color scheme is another subtle reference. While the color may be the first thing to hit your eye while looking at the magazine, you would never notice the difference in colors at first glance of the magazines, the difference is prominent, but the reason why is not. To finish, I do believe each of these magazines hits their target audience well.
