Throughout all businesses it is important for somebody to know who it is that wants to buy their product. In particular, many media companies will need to know who it is that wants to go watch their film, their TV show and buy any related products. The media is important to these people, but the people who benefit most from knowing their audience are politicians - You need to know who you want to vote for you if you want them to vote for you. Recently, as you may be aware, there was an election for the next American president, and it was won by the Republican Candidate Donald Trump, who, above all else that can be said about him, knows his audience very well. No doubt that he had plenty of people put hours and hours of research into finding this out, and some of the methods of doing this will be stated below:
Quantitative Audience Research:
Quantitative Research is a very particular and specific type of, usually, statistical research. If, for example, the amount of people attending a Donald Trump rally were 70% white, or 60% male, they'd know that these types of people are their audience. They wouldn't necessarily spend most of their time and money targeting Mexican women because the figures shown don't make these people seem like a priority audience to Trump. They'll get numbers off of people to see what approval is, they'll get specific panels to give their representations, and they'll base their figures off of statistics, facts and numbers - quantities. For example, the numbers on Trump's campaign would represent that he got 60 million votes as opposed to Hillary's 61, but he got 290 electoral votes as opposed to Hillary's 232. Out of this, 58% of white Americans voted Trump, and 53% of men. Numbers represent facts on what to focus on, but they don't show everything.
Qualitative Audience Research:
The other thing people need to know about audience is the quality of people participating in their product or, in this case, political campaign. Things that are harder to represent by numbers, such as opinions. While you can represent a group of peoples race on numbers, you can't represent whether or not they agree with Trump's statements as well. For this, as opposed to writing down representative numbers, you would need to collect focus groups (asking people for their opinions on certain problems and their attitudes to what is represented), questionnaires that represent what they believe and face-to-face interviews where they talk to people. It's about opinions rather than fact, which is just as important to a politician or advertiser. In Trump's case, it's crucial to know why somebody wants to build a Mexican border wall, why they might be against Obamacare and what their thoughts are on making American great again, and Qualitative Research helps in this.
Audience Classifications:
The other things people need to understand for a product are how audiences are classed. Importantly, demographics would show social status of somebody based on their job and roles in society, how somebody might contribute, such as a doctor being a more valuable target consumer of a product than a stay at home middle aged dad, as the Trump administration, as all politicians, would care more about the doctor in most situations. Getting the doctors on side would be more important, and you need to know what the stereotype of this audience would desire to hear. In England, doctors would love to hear a politician say they're going to save the NHS, but in America they might be more excited by hearing about the abolishing of Obamacare. They need to consider all markets, and someone like Trump would be better able to appreciate socio-economic information (job and income, and even information like states and neighbourhoods), psychographics (thoughts and opinions) and mainstream, niche or alternative views on a specific factor.
These are the types of things that people need to appreciate to target an audience, but it's crucial for someone like Trump to appreciate these facts, as it, evidently, can help sell the product against a lesser advertiser-capable opponent.
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