Appealing to an Audience

Henry Buckham

Take a Break

Take a Break is a magazine aimed at lower-middle class middle aged women, in their 30s/40s but research has shown that this magazine has a reader base of 18 years old up to 80.

Readers are more likely to own their own home, be married and have children.

Take a Break has a total of 12 million copies published every year, with 1.2 copies sold each second. There is a total of around 2.5 million readers, with only 400,000 of these men.

Readers are shown to have read this publication more thoroughly than competitors and have strong reader loyalty.

Target Audience

Take a Break is more aimed at the female demographic as evidenced by many of the stories focusing on the subject of relationship troubles and drama, with a lot of focus on gossip. These stories follow a pattern of being about children or men, something women can relate to as mothers and married women are a core demographic.

Often these stories rely on sensationalism (exaggerating certain aspects of the story to incite a feeling) in order to sell copies or encourage people to read. This includes emphasizing certain words or dominating more of the page with the story.

There is also content that review the soap operas on TV (shows that are mainly watched by middle-old aged women) and a large emphasis on the magazine’s own bingo game (a game with no major demographic but has a large housewife following)

Layout, Colours and Image Each Take a Break magazine is radically different in terms of the

styling/positioning of the front page’s content. While the familiar red logo is retained each time in the top left, there are multicoloured boxes of varying sizes and shapes that hold the snippets from each story, The bright and vibrant colours help to catch the reader’s eyes from a shelf.

Each copy features a large photograph of a middle aged woman on the right hand side, representing the majority reader base. This also be a ploy for women to feel more comfortable buying the magazine, as opposed to something with a photograph of a male.

Each issue also offers a lot of prizes and giveaway with rewards that are tailored for middle aged people – cars, shopping trips and holidays. These types of gifts would be slightly out of place in a magazine tailored for younger people, where the prizes offered are normally cosmetics, electronics or video games.

The prizes offered are typically placed in the header bar, where they can be easily seen thanks to their proximity of the logo.

Page Layouts Each story of Take a Break is arranged in a typical tabloid

format but with coloured highlights that indicate where the text begins, as well as ‘tilted’ photographs and stylized header that create a casual atmosphere, as if the magazine was an informal notice board. This contributes to the magazine’s overall casual ‘laid back’ approach for its readers.

The captions included in stories are often extremely basic and merely describe the image as seen below. This means that the audience can understand the context of these images with ease instead of trying to decipher culture references or complex descriptions.