Research Magazines

The first magazine that I have chosen to research is Cosmopolitan. This magazine is aimed at women around the ages of 16-25, with a psychographic profile of aspires, hedonists and materialists, and a demographic classification of C1. The subject matter for this magazine is based around relationships, celebrity news and gossip, fashion and female weight and body shape. They have used a celebrity as the model for the front cover, Kate Hudson, in a mid close up shot and use the colours of orange, pink, purple, yellow and red for it's design, this could connote vibrancy, full of life and energy and female confidence, both in relationships, they looks and body and in fashion and style. They mainly use a sans sherif font which could connote a fun, informal magazine that will use modern language rather than the proper upper middle class Queen's English. The language used in this magazine is informal and would therefore appeal to a wider audience of the female population. This magazine uses reversed out straplines, all in different colours, to draw the reader to each of the them individually. They are all in different colours to make it appear that there is a lot of different and exciting things in this magazine, more so than in any other. Finally this magazine offers the chance to win money (£40,000). This could connote that modern, fun loving women also are fiancailly independent and have a sizable income, similarly connoted by the £3.00 price tag that targets the more upper class business woman.

The second magazine that I will be analysing is Heat. Like Cosmopolitan, the magazine is aimed at women aged 16-25, with a demographic of C2 and a psychographic profile of materialists and aspires. The subject matter for this magazine is celebrity news and gossip and as such the models used for this magazine are celebrities, in this case Nikki from Big Brother. The colours used in this magazine are based around red, black and pink, with small parts of the magazine in pink and blue. As this magazine is targeted for a more general female audience the language is informal and lighthearted and by using a sans sherif font conveys a fun, lighthearted magazine that appeals to a wider female audience. However with this magazine there are no offer, freebies or competitions to help draw the reader in. On the other hand this magazine, like Cosmopolitan, has a bar code, masthead, reversed out straplines, date, price and MCU of the chosen celebrity that is also the main sell of the magazine.






The final magazine that I will be analysing is OK magazine. The target audience for this magazine are females aged between 20-30, with a demographic of B or C1 and a psychographic profile of succeeders, aspires, traditionalists and materialists. This magazine is aimed at more business or other professional working women rather than teenagers due to it's more upmarket price of 2.95 as many teenagers or other young females will prefer a magazine much less expensive due to their limited funds. The subject matter for this magazine is celebrity news and gossip and this is confirmed by the fact that they only use cover shots of celebrities for the magazine, in this issue the celebrity involved is Jordan and is therefore the main sell of the magazine. The cover shot is a MCU. The font used is sans sherif, and along with it's informal language, connotes a fun and informal magazine that would appeal to a wider audience. The colours used in this magazine are mainly bold and bright colours like red, blue, purple and pink. This similarly connotes a fun, lively and informal magazine and the use of a different colour for each story in the magazine connotes that in this magazine there are lots of different celebrity stories that also try and justify the high price tag. This magazine has also used reverse straplines that make the words of the other stories stand out and draw your attention to each story. Similarly with the previous two magazines this magazine has a puff 'First for celebrity gossip', a price, a barcode, date of issue, masthead and reversed out straplines.