The Brief and Research

I have been waiting to get this unit started and underway and here we go, the brief is to produce the following;

• A full mock up colour front cover including title, splashes, etc.
• A contents page describing what content would be typically in a monthly publication.
• A full colour double page containing content or a story aimed at your primary target audience.

The target audience is college and university students aged 16 - 21, having done some resarch on this there are approximately 450,000 students under the age of 20 in the UK, this however is just figures for university students, and with the introduction of the EMA the number of 6th Form / College students is likely to be much higher. 

Also having done some reasearch on magazine sales for the last half of 2010 it has been quite clear that sales have dropped, some magazines have faired worse than others.  For example lads magazines Nuts have seen a drop in sales by 22% per week, and Zoo 27.9%.  FHM have come off slightly better but still lost 18.1% of there readership.  Although sales of lads magazines have seen a sharp decline the sale of womens magazines such as Heat and Closer have also dropped but only by 6.9% and 1% respectively, other magazines for example New! has seen sales increase tenfold b 47.5% aswell as good housekeeping increase by 3.1%.

These figures show to me that we are no longer in a magazine buying market, this could be due the economic downturn and peoples discposable cash not being as high as it was, or the content in the magazines is already readily available on the internet.

Since reading week i have started doing as much reasearch as possible, because i am in Australia its bee neasier to gather this information but getting the right information has been a struggle because i've not been able to get help from tutors in class time.  However i feel that i am on track to be able to pitch my proposal on the Friday i get back (18th March).

The Initial Idea

The initial idea i had was to produce a magazine with both lads elements (sport, gadgets, women) and womens elements (fashion, real life stories) but after doing my market reasearch i came to the conclusion that this woudlnt be a great idea, because lads mags sales have dropped by a quarter in the last 6 months of 2010 alone.  So i thought why not make the magazine specifica for students in the way that all the content is submitted by students, for example;

• Beans on toast alternatives
• Real life stories
• Great nights out
• Shoe strong holidays
• Help and advice

I have spoken to a few people that are already at univery and asked them what they would expect to see in a magazine aimed just at students, and that would be information about the area, including places to drink and eat, cheap drink offers in supermarkets, quickand cheap meals, real life stories (from students), university or college information, sports team results, fixtures and tables, SU information (nights out and drinks offers). 

I have thought about this and will incorperate these ideas into my final design.