Both: Survey Results & Analysis [complete]

Here is one of our surveys which we handed out to our target audience of 25 - 30 year olds:

Survey Results

Survey randomly distributed to 20 people of our target age group (25 – 30).

Q1] Are you...

Male (9/20 or 45%)

Female (11/20 or 55%)

Q2] Do you buy music magazines?

Yes (12/20 or 60%)

No (8/20 or 40%)

Q3] What genres of music do you enjoy? (Multi-Choice; 55 total answers; percentages have been rounded)

Pop (15 different people, 15/55 or 27%)

Dance (7 different people, 7/55 or 12%)

Rock (10 different people, 10/55 or 18%)

Indie (11 different people, 11/55 or 20%)

Hip-Hop/Rap (4 different people, 4/55 or 7%)

Classical (1 person, 1/55 or 1%)

R&B (7 different people, 7/55 or 12%)

Other (0 people)

Q4] Do you prefer...

Articles [more text, less photos] (6/20 or 30%)

Image Galleries [less text, more photos] (6/20 or 30%)

No Preference (8/20 or 40%)

Q5] Would you prefer a magazine that was

Weekly (4/20 or 20%)

Bi-Weekly (7/20 or 35%)

Monthly (9/20 or 45%)

Q6] Would you consider subscribing to a magazine you a magazine you enjoyed?

Yes (11/20 or 55%)

No (9/20 or 45%)

Q7] What is your favourite feature of a music magazine? (One tick answer only)

News (3/20 or 15%)

Album Reviews (4/20 or 20%)

Track Reviews (2/20 or 10%)

Live Reviews (2/20 or 10%)

Editorials (1/20 or 5%)

Band Specific Features (6/20 or 30%)

Other (2/20 or 10%)

Q8] What is the maximum amount you would be prepared to spend on a music magazine?

Average answer (rounded off to 2 decimal places): £3.39

Q9] Do you enjoy music magazine freebies?

Yes (11/20 or 55%)

No (7/20 or 35%)

No Preference (2/20 or 10%)

Q10] If “Yes” to the previous question, would you be prepared to pay more for your magazine if it included “freebies”? (11 people answered yes on the last question, so they were allowed to answer this one)

Yes (1/11)

No (10/11)

Q11] Which of these newspapers do you read? (Multi-Choice; 26 total answers; percentages have been rounded)

Daily Star (1/26 or 4%)

The Sun (5/26 or 19%)

Daily Mirror (3/26 or 11%)

Daily Mail (5/26 or 19%)

Daily Express (3/26 or 11%)

The Guardian (7/26 or 27%)

The Times (3/26 or 11%)

None Of The Above (1/26 or 4%)

Q12] Which of these logos do you prefer?

Logo 1 (14/20 or 70%)

Logo 2 (1/20 or 5%)

Logo 3 (2/20 or 10%)

Logo 4 (2/20 or 10%)

Logo 5 (1/20 or 5%)

Graphs

Survey Analysis

We produced a 12 question survey that we distributed to 20 random members of our target age group (25 to 30 year olds).  They filled them in and these are the results.

We asked the respondents of our survey what their gender was and if they purchased music magazines to scout out the market of potential purchasers.  Of the 20 people we randomly surveyed, 9 of them were male and 11 of them were female.  Of those male respondents, 5 of them purchase music magazines.  Of those female respondents, 7 of them purchase music magazines.  This means that, whilst the survey allocation was random, the results still show that there is still a sizeable female market for music magazines that we could tap into. Whilst the male market is still worth a fairly large percentage, we could try to skew towards female readers a bit more, or at the very least feature some females in our magazine.

We asked the question of which music genres our respondents enjoy so that we could see if we needed to focus on any specific genres.  We also allowed multiple answers to be ticked, seeing as we knew that people like more than just one genre of music.  We got a total of 55 answers.  15 of them were for pop music, 7 for dance, 10 for rock, 11 for indie, 4 for hip-hop/rap, 1 response for classical and 7 for R&B.  This gives us a very even spread of possible genres to cover and, since several respondents chose multiple, often completely opposite genres, there does seem to be a gap in the market for a music magazine that treats all types with equal reverence.

We asked the question of preference to image galleries or articles to see how we should ratio our images and text in our articles.  Of the 20 people we randomly surveyed; 6 of them preferred their magazine features to be image galleries (with more photos and less texts), 6 of them preferred actual articles (with more text and less photos) whilst 8 people did not have any strong opinions one way or the other.  This gives us a lot of leeway to experiment with the presentation of our articles and gives us the ability to mix up the format of the magazine often enough to keep it interesting.

We asked the question on how our respondents prefer the frequency of a magazine to help decide how often we should distribute ours.  Our initial idea was to make it bi-weekly, but the results tell a different story.  4 people prefer a weekly magazine, 7 prefer one that is bi-weekly and 9 prefer one that is monthly.  We now should revise our publishing schedule and strategy to reflect this, even if it does put us in direct competition with similar magazines owned by Bauer Media such as Q and Mojo.

We asked our survey respondents if they would subscribe to a magazine that they enjoyed to see if the subscription model was a viable option.  11 people said that they would subscribe whilst 9 said they wouldn't.  Interestingly; of the respondents who said they'd prefer a weekly magazine, half of them said they'd subscribe if they enjoyed the magazine.  2 out of the 7 people who'd prefer a bi-weekly magazine would subscribe.  And 7 of the 9 who prefer monthly magazines would subscribe to a magazine they enjoyed.  If we want the subscription model to be profitable, we would be best suited switching our production schedule to a monthly magazine.

We asked the question on the subject's preferred feature in a music magazine in order to see what we needed to focus most of our attention on in regards to the magazine.  We also limited this to a one tick answer question in order to better get a handle on the respondents favoured section.  3 people preferred news, 4 preferred album reviews, 2 preferred track reviews, 2 preferred live reviews, 1 person enjoyed editorials, 6 preferred band specific features and 2 chose other and wrote that “They did not like music magazines at all”.  So, disregarding the last two answers, we have a very clear percentage favouring band specific features.  But, if the results show anything, it's that we should also focus a good amount of time in each issue to album reviews and news whilst de-emphasising the other features.

The question of the maximum amount people were willing to spend on a music magazine was chosen to see at exactly what point people would stop considering purchasing a magazine and we could then take that into account when setting a price for our magazine.  By choosing the word “maximum” we could then get an honest answer with actual data we could use.  If we chose “minimum” we'd just get a bunch of “nothing” and “£0.00” instead of usable data.  The average price, after adding up all of the prices and dividing by 20 (the number of respondents), was £3.39.  This should be the maximum we price our magazine, though a slight price drop could secure a wide audience.

We asked whether our surveyed respondents enjoyed freebies in their music magazines to see if, if we were to include them, people would actually like them.  11 of them said yes, 7 said no and 2 had no preference.  Because we realised that including freebies would increase production costs and require us to jack up the price, we then asked the follow-up question, “Would you be prepared to pay more for your magazine if it included freebies?”  The almost universal (i.e. Everyone but one) response was an emphatic “no”.  Whilst this appears to be a damned if we do, damned if we don’t situation; we should probably not include freebies, especially since the higher price resulting from them would scare away at least half of our audience.

We asked what newspaper(s) people read as a subliminal question.  On the surface, it’s just a random question.  In reality, it’s a test.  Each of the newspapers listed has a different writing style that improves the further down you go (starting with The Daily Star’s tabloid gossipy “journalism” and ending with the extremely uppity and posh broadsheet of The Times).  From this, we can then judge the kind of writing style we will include in our magazine based on the kind that our respondents enjoy reading.  The writing style of The Guardian won out (7 different people ticked it on their surveys) so that means we should have a professional approach to reporting stories but leaving plenty of room to divulge our opinions once the actual story reporting is done.

Finally, we asked our survey respondents to choose between 5 different logo ideas for our magazine.  The most popular one would be spruced up and become the official logo of the new magazine.  Logo 1 won the majority vote (14 people).  However, we did not ask them why they chose the particular logo they did.  This is a missed opportunity as it would have given us an idea on how to improve it or know exactly why they liked that particular one.