Profiling Our Target Audience

Our target audience for the single will most likely be quite broad, with listeners being mostly aged between twenty-five and forty-five. We can profile potential audience members using the JICNARS scale in order to know how to best market our product. Due to the ranged age group of country listeners, we won't be able to pinpoint an exact social grade who will be the most interested, however we can assume that most of our consumers will fall within the C2 and E boundaries in America, and in Britain, the C1 and A boundaries. The reason for this is that in the United States, where country began, it was sung by poor, working class men about their daily lives as a way to pass the time and possibly make some money on the side. In Great Britain however, country music has been intellectualised and is mostly listened to by the middle classes and the well educated. It has been altered into a kind of 'alternative' form of country, and has been described as 'skinny indie music'. Because of this alteration, it shows that the performers/listeners are more interested in expressing their thoughts, feelings, opinions and all those other things that absolutely nobody cares about with music rather than their fists (which is what the working class men who created country would undoubtedly have done, life is full of little ironies like that).

In order to further our ability to efficiently market and generate a profit, we can utilise Psychographic Segmentation, or lifestyle profiling to further try to attract the attention of our audience, for example where to advertise; what kinds of places would our audience go to and see our product, which websites will they visit, which radio stations and TV channels are they most likely to watch? In order to get a better idea of the habits of our audience, we can refer to the Values, Attitudes and Lifestyles (VALS) classification system. This method closely ties in with the JICNARS scale, although rather than targeting audiences by class and social status, it uses personality types as a basis for profiling them into a certain category. The most surprising (?) thing about this system is that it actually works alarmingly accurately.

The JICNARS Scale... 

VALS: "It should be understood from the start that these lifestyle categories are not fixed and immutable. Many people grow from one level to another as children, as adolescents, and as adults. Some very few may start at the bottom and reach the top within a lifetime, but far more common is movement of a level or two." - Context Institute (c) 1983