UNIT 6: LO2 GQ Magazine Report 22/10/2014

For UNIT 6 LO2 I had to analyse a magazine with my group of 3. The magazine
we chose to analyse was QG magazine one of the biggest mens magazines in
the world which is spread over various countries and continents. Our aim for
this task was to find who the target audience where, how the magazine is laid
out, mode of address and so on.
Our first group task was to analyse the construction and content of the
magazine GQ we found out a lot about the history on the magazine and how it
developed over the years into what we know today. As a group we split
separate ways and analysed the magazine in different eras. My job was to
analyse the magazine in its early years in the 70s-90s, straight from the off I
found it easy to analyse as the magazines where extremely basic and nicely laid
out. You can tell they have aimed there magazine at men as there isnt much
content on the magazine cover and as from what my group questionnaire says
I can confirm its true. The magazines in the 80s changed dramatically from the
start to the end, at the start they had one main image of a male who was an
important figure or role model in that era and only 3 or 4 cover lines on the left
side, but I feel this layout was a good idea as males would respond to these
covers. The colours used are clever because in the summer editions they used
a yellow font to emphasise that summer is coming, the GQ logo was a bright
red at the time, and from certain magazines they colour match for instance, in
one edition the GQ logo was red and the males snorkelling goggles where the
same red which draws your attention into the middle of the magazine.
The questionnaire my group and I handed out had 9 questions, 5 of which
where qualitative questions and 3 which where quantitave, the answers we
got where totally varied, obviously the magazine is aimed at men but we
handed out the magazine to 2 females too. The answers given by the females
where obviously not great but I could extract some handy information and
data, on the other hand the males inputs where great it gave me a real
understanding about what males like and dislike about the magazine I could
tell all the males liked the layout of the front covers and the images on the
front. They said they liked the interesting phrases used in the cover lines and
said these covers lines would make me want to read the inside.
The questionnaire came with an image of the front cover and a content page.
The content page was an article on fashion and the section was called GQ
Dresser which is a page in every issue they make, they also have an image of
Channing Tatum who is a big male role model and a trend setter to gentlemen.
The answers we received from these sections where positive as the males we
questioned enjoyed the article and said they would read others like it. When
collecting data on the magazine we found psychographic information analysing
the magazine, and who the readers are and what type of person they are. We
found out the readers tend to be between 16-30 and are middle class people,
so from this information we can tell these people aspire to be like the people
on the cover and want to be able to dress like top celebrities etc. I may be a bit
stereotypical but its true.
So this exercise was good as we could fully understand the magazine and
everything around it, I learnt there is so much more to a magazine than I first
thought, I never realised by going into this much detail I could get some really
good information and properly understand how and why magazines are laid
out in certain ways, it gave me a real understanding of the magazine and
whom the target audience is and how they have been targeted.

GQ in the 80s GQ in 2014