How Do Media Professionals Know Their Audiences?

Although this seems like an easy question to answer, there really is a lot of ground to cover. Questions I often arrive at as an Advertising major could include attempting to get to the audience, and how exactly can I define each particular audience. Every single consumer in society is being targeted by different conglomerates for very different reasons. As a consumer I always hope to get the best out of any and every product, additionally as someone who could possibly be interested in one day creating plans to target different groups of people, there needs to be a great deal of research. This brings me to my initial approach, and response to this question.

The first thing that media professionals need to do is begin working backwards, they can do this by examining the target market and providing simple tests and evaluations in order to decipher what exactly the market's needs are. For instance observations and surveys can be taken to examine the needs further to help lock into place exactly what the audience/target market is looking for. This allows a relationship to be formed, the conglomerates and media professionals are now expressing an interest in their consumers and this allows both parties to become accustomed with one another.

There are also ways for different media professionals to branch outside their comfort zones, and see if they can expand beyond their target markets. These global efforts have proven to be both successful in many cases-- for instance the McDonald's franchise, this was always a predominantly American concept, and has become part of the American culture. Yet, when one branches outside of the United States, there are McDonalds' everywhere, although this embodies an aspect of American culture, it has become part of a global culture as well. Although these efforts are not successful for all services and products.

Furthermore there are some threatening ideas that accompany this idea that media professionals are making attempts to know us so well, and in addition these efforts are solely being made for an overall profit. All of this research and efforts to get to know the market (me and you) seems a bit invasive being the overall goal is money driven.