Focus Group

Today in my media class, we were told that we were going to have a focus group session and it was going to be recorded. So we all got into a circle and started to discuss the positives and negatives of each person’s school magazine front cover. I think that it is good that we discussed the positives and negatives in a group as it give you an indication of where you have gone wrong and will help you improve on our actual music magazine front cover. We started by discussing the positives of the front covers and how effective some of the things that people have done was to the cover of the magazine. One of the things that we discussed in the focus group was left thirds, the majority of the class had used left third on there magazine as they found it a good technique to use, we found that this was a positive aspect to our school magazine as when on a shelf the left thirds is the main thing you can see so you get to know about what’s inside the cover and get and insight to what the magazine is all about. We then went on to discuss the logos of our magazines. We all agreed that it is a good thing to have a logo on a magazine front cover so that people know what they are reading and also it will give them a little bit of an idea as to what the magazine involves. We also said that having the logo fairly bold and eye catching will help the magazine as it will look more interesting and the people will want to pick it up and read it. I used a logo on my magazine so that readers knew what the main genre of the magazine was about and tried to present a link to the school. This is good as it would have given a bigger impact on the reader when looking at the magazine front cover. After we had discussed all of the positive aspects to our magazine front covers we then when on to discuss the negatives and why we probably shouldn't use them on our magazine front cover and how we had used them incorrectly on our magazine and made it look unprofessional. One of the negatives that we discussed was having a bar-code on the front cover. A lot of people had put a bar-code on the front cover of there magazine which we realized that it was not needed as the magazine was a school magazine so a bar-code had no relevance to the magazine as the children at the school wouldn't be paying for it as it was free. This is where other people went wrong as well as they put a price on there magazine too which was also not needed and took some room which could have been filled with something else that mattered more. The price wasn't needed as the magazine was free and was suppose to be a school magazine so it wasn't needed. The bar-code and price took up a bit of space on the magazine cover when really that space could have been used for something else such as a puff.

Whilst talking in the focus group we started to talk about what we would still put in our magazines. We came to the decision on what it would be a good idea to still use left thirds on the music magazine front cover. We though that this would be ideal as left thirds are useful to find little bits of information about the front cover. As for the double page spread we though that the idea of having a bright text box to the left hand side of the double page spread like the one that we was looking at that was from an NME magazine was a creative and some people might think of using it in the magazine double page spread as it stood out because it was colourful and near to the middle of the double page spread and it also looked professional and slightly quirky.

In the focus group we also examined NME music magazine front cover, contents page and double page spread so that we could get an inspiration as to what our magazine could look like and get suggestions on what professional looks like so we could try and incorporate that when designing our music magazine. 

We started with the front cover. We all said that the NME magazine had a unique selling point which was a CD. The reason this was the USP is because when going to buy the magazine you would see the CD and think that it would be a good buy because there is a free CD on the cover. This is a good USP as people who like that genre and band they would want to have that CD to listen to. With the USP the information on the front cover is all related to the CD so that this would give the reader more information and make them more interested. They also have a small price placed on the magazine this is so that not too much attention is drawn to the price but you can still see how much it is. 

We also talked about the contents page of this magazine we said that it was like a second front page and the only difference was that it gave you more information about the articles inside. They also carry on using the house style which is red this is good as that way they show that the magazine has a colour scheme going on throughout every issue. We also discussed the double page spread this had a contrast of blue and black which stood out and we all thought that it would catch peoples attention. There was also bold text which was big and caught your eye so it would have interested people. We all thought that this magazine was a really good one as it was very detail and was a great magazine to research what a proper rock magazine would look like so that we could get an idea on what type of magazine we wanted to do and also give us ideas on what we would want our music magazine to look like.