Audience theories

•  Target audience Demographics-the consumer is categorized in terms of concrete variables such as age, class, gender, geographical area. Psychographics-the consumer is categorized in terms of their needs and desires such as those who aspire to a richer lifestyle or those who want to make the world a better place.
•  Hypodermic syringe model Effects of media texts on audiences have been the subject of study for nearly as long as the initial research centered on the hypodermic model this theory suggests that the audience receive an intravenous injection of a media text which could be negative or positive. The weakness of this model is that audiences are seen as passive and malleable with no thought of their own.
•  Inoculation model this suggests that long term exposure to repeated media messages makes audiences immune to them. For example prolonged exposure to media violence would desensitize the audience to say that they are no longer shocked by it
•  Two step flow model this study discovered that individual views were most affected by opinion leaders who played a key role in the communication process. Opinion leaders both filtered and disseminated media messages, thus Lazarsfeld discovered a two-step communication flow from the medium through the opinion leader to the individual.
• Uses and gratifications model this suggested that what people do with the media was governed by what they need from the media. The assumption within this model is that individuals are active participants in the mass communication process. People are seen to be able to select and reject aspects of media output according to individual needs. The problem is that the audience is always seen to be seeking gratification of specific needs when in fact this is not necessarily always the case.
•  Cultural affects the thinking behind this theory centers on the long term effects of particular ideological representations on our beliefs and values.
•  The encoding/decoding model This is centered on the idea that audiences vary in their response to media messages, due to they are influenced by their social position, gender, age, ethnicity, occupation, experiences and beliefs. In this model media texts are seen to be encoded in such a way as to present a preferred reading to the audience.