Analyzing Your Audience

Abstract

Selling a product requires a thorough knowledge of the potential buyers. Marketers acquire and apply such knowledge about consumers. Likewise, environmental communicators anticipate particular reactions to their messages by audiences. Sending messages that produce the desired effects requires a thorough knowledge of the groups with whom you will communicate. Audience analysis comes early in the communication planning process for many reasons, because appreciating and catering to the attitudes and opinions of the groups your messages reach is crucial to the success of a campaign. A target audience is any group for which a message is specifically developed and intentionally focused. An intended audience is one that the communicator expects to react to a message. This is not everyone who might see the message. The more you know about your intended audience, the more likely the message is to be received and acted in accordance with your campaign’s goals. By action, we mean anything from becoming aware of a situation to permanently modifying a behavior within the audience. As you might suspect, making an audience aware of something is a lot easier than changing their behaviors. In this chapter we will deal with several aspects of analyzing audiences to promote an understanding of why people may or may not respond to your messages.