target audience!

Hello everyone! 
For this posting, I'll be examining the target audience of women's fashion magazines. Although the general gist of the target audience for this genre seemed abundantly clear, after further research I've discovered that this is not true. I read a blogger's perspective on the dynamics of race in fashion magazines, and the results were interesting. The Penn State focused blog talked about how different fashion magazines target different races of women, which I touched on in a previous post about representation. While doing this, these magazines do seem to have a similar age range for their audience. For example, Cosmopolitan targets predominantly white women ages 18-49 while Essence targets predominantly African-American women ages 18-54. However, apart from the difference in race, it appears that the slightly different focus in age also has an effect. The blog came to the conclusion that Cosmopolitan has an average age of 34 for its readers, which explains the differences in content from Essence. The blog read that "Women in their thirties are still developing ideas and figuring out the real world. They want to know about different things in sex life and new careers they can look for." To contrast, the average age for Essence is 42, explaining their focus on lifestyle rather than sex and career. This information was further backed up by research on both magazines and their demographics. 

When focusing further on Cosmopolitan's demographics, which reflect on other demographics in the genre, the statistics demonstrate that 58% of their audience is ages 18-34. 41% of their audience makes over $20,000 as far as Individual Employment Income, while 62% of their audience has also graduated college. These are all important indicators as to who would be reading the magazines we're creating for this project. About 3,000+ of Cosmopolitan readers are attending college/university, while almost 2,000 Vogue readers are. And 10,000+ Cosmopolitan readers are employed, which is also a big factor in regards to written content and advertisements. In regards to parenting, about 8,000+ Cosmo readers are mothers who don't work, while about 5,000+ are mothers who do.

Now all of this information demonstrates that although there is not much gender diversity in this genre, there is a lot of diversity in regards to living conditions such as education, parenthood, and age in general. Through this information, I know that we will have to use different strategies to apply to these different age groups of women. We have to make sure our tactics will work for all of these groups. As we continue planning our magazine we will use this information to make the ad and design decisions.