Audience Positioning

Uses and Gratifications Theory

Uses and Gratifications theory as developed by Bulmer and Katz suggests that media users play an active role in choosing and using the media. Bulmer and Katz believed that the user seeks out the media source that best fulfils their needs.

The uses and gratifications theory assumes the audience chooses what it wants to watch for five different reasons.

Information and Education – the viewer wants to acquire information, knowledge and understanding by watching programmes like The News or Documentaries.

Entertainment – Viewers watch programmes for enjoyment.

Personal Identity - Viewers can recognise a person or product, role models that reflect similar values to themselves and mimic or copy some of their characteristics.

Integration and social interaction – the ability for media products to produce a topic of conversation between people. For example who is the best contestant on The X-factor who which was the best goal shown on Match of the day.

Escapism – Computer games and action films let viewers escape their real lives and imagine themselves in those situations

In what ways can the target, heterosexual , female, working class, 25-50, housewife audience derive uses and gratifications from this image? (Breeze advert "Woman" magazine).

The uses and gratifications that they could derive from this could be aspirational for them because the audience wants to aspire to be like the woman in the advert. Additionally, the uses and gratifications could be personal identity because the model is the ideal audience meaning that the audience can see themselves being like the model in the advert if they use the soap. It could also be escapism because the audience can imagine themselves looking like the model and imagine they have a similar lifestyle to the people in the magazine. It could be targeting the secondary audience of males such as the women's husbands because of the sexual gratification. There is social interaction because the model is stylish for the time period the magazine was produced in.

Preferred Reading Theory: (Stewart Hall)
The concept is to be approached carefully: often texts intentionally have multiple meanings/readings, and of course, as we have discovered, audiences can potentially get whatever they want out of any media text.

The right reading of a text, which can be enforced by positioning.

Hall categorised audience response into three separate groups:

Preferred reading (The producer wants the audience to completely agree with the intended ideology) Dominant reading (Completely agree with the intended ideology)

Negotiated reading (Agrees with some of the intended ideology but rejects other ideologies)

Oppositional reading (Completely rejecting the intended ideology)

These can help us to understand whether or not an audience sticks to the preferred reading, or if they decide to make their own decision as to how to decode a text.

Adbusters' "Christian Loubouton" advert:

What is the ideology of the producer:
Fashion is overhyped and people spent too much money on materialistic things when there are people struggling to obtain what we, living in a first world country, would class as basic objects that everyone should have. Adbusters as the producer are alternative and want to go against what most people think.

What is the preferred reading:
The producer wants the audience to completely agree with the ideology that we shouldn't be spending so much money on shoes when there are people who are doing everything they can to get bad quality shoes. They agree that we should be helping people in a third world country. Additionally, the producer wants the audience to see the inequality in society that there is a huge contrast/binary opposition between the upper and lower classes. The advert is also supposed to shock the audience and be thought provoking for the audience.

What is the oppositional reading:
The audience completely rejecting the ideas of the producer and saying that if you can afford it then you should be allowed to buy whatever you want, including expensive items. They may also think that there is no way that they can make a difference and that it is not down to them to change other peoples problems. They could think that the advert was using stereotypes that are not necessarily true.

What is the dominant reading:
When the audience completely accepts the preferred reading. The audience feels guilty and that they should do something about it.

What is the aberrant reading:
The most common reading which would be the audience agreeing with the fact that we should be supporting and helping people in third world countries who cannot afford and do not have the resources to lead a life that we would consider normal but they may reject the ideas about how the advert is suggesting that we shouldn't buy expensive clothes when people are struggling to get adequate shoes. You might not be able to have a full understanding of the advert as they may not be able to understand or relate to some things the advert is saying. For example, they may not know anything about the brand.

Compare and contrast the different ways that Woman and Adbusters position their audiences.