Chapter 8: Analyze your audience

To me, chapter 8: analyze your audience is a comprehensive and down-to-earth guideline for practitioners keep in mind when they have problems finding what the publics really care about. As a communication major student, it has been my belief that knowing the audience is the key to communication campaigns. However, when it comes to research and analysis, we are often constrained by lack of time, funding and organizational supports. More often than not, conducting audience research ends up with unrealistic things to invest from the profit-corporation side.

This chapter discussed how to start and utilize research information to analyze our audience and tailor messages to them. Fist, we begin to set purposes and objectives we aim to achieve through the communication efforts. Defining goals and objectives are extremely important for managerial positions. Objectives allow us to evaluate the effects of our communication campaigns. Second, we determine the most appropriate level of audience analysis based on the previous purpose and objectives. Three levels of audience analysis can be summarized into the following table.

	Suitable for	Purpose	Time
Baseline	Any risk com. and Crisis com	Comfort and build awareness	4 hours to 2 weeks
Midline Analysis	Care communication	Increase awareness	1 week to 1month
Comprehensive Analysis	Care and Consensus Communication	Change behavior	3 weeks to 2months

Then, we make a detail list of the key audience characteristics we need to know. After that, we can determine what kind of methods would be appropriate to find information. Usually, direct methods including interviews, surveys, focus group yield more depth information than less direct methods while less-direct methods, using surrogate audiences and existing sources of information, can save us time and cost. Finally, the author raised the issue of the selection of communication channels and messages. The key concept here is to “tailor risk messages to meet specific audience and situation needs (p. 138).”

After reading this, I can’t help saying that all of these are so perfect. The issue would be whether we can implement all steps in terms of analyzing audience. I am curious about several questions: when we are dealing with a crisis situation that happened before in the same industry (e.g. food industry or pharmaceutical industry), would it be necessary to collect as much information as we can or we may follow what certain organizations have done to respond to the crisis and slightly modified the way? I’m thinking this is the value of why we having case study discussions. Knowing what other people perform in the similar situations help us learn how to handle it in a more responsible and successful manner. Besides, using surrogate audiences seems cost-effective when it comes to communication risk to a distant community. The way of using surrogating audience is similar to convenience sampling. The information may have problems in generalization to other subgroups. In this way, would some audience information be better than none once the information is misleading or biased?