Target Audience

As I have mentioned I am doing the NAMM show for my Wordpress site. And as I have previously mentioned identifying a target audience early on is essential. It has dramatic impacts on styling choices and just generally allows you to tailor you service specifically to the people who you are aiming to reach. This hopefully strikes a chord with your selected age range and makes them more likely to engage with what you have to offer.

So. The NAMM show is predominantly about guitars and musical instruments. I think the age range is very wide. I think on the low end it is probably from around 20 years old up to anywhere around 50. However, that is quite a conservative estimate. People who are in their 70's and up attend the conference as do people younger than 20 but I think the age range I mentioned is a sensible estimate.

So the people are between 20 and 50. Now obviously they are going to be musicians. This makes them creative and, for the most part, purveyors of quality. Musical instruments classically were hand crafted from the finest, resonant materials that were lacquered and treated to a high sheen. They were works of passion and their quality reflected that. They last for years and can go for 10's and even 100's of thousands of dollars. So they are discerning. This means that the site needs to be of a high standard.

This goes hand in hand with the target audience usually being wealthy. Most of the public that go to these shows sometimes have a few hundred or even thousand dollars to spend on musical equipment and the companies that go there are global enterprises with a deep history, this is something else to consider.

Because of the wide age range and the nature of most musicians I think that the site needs to be quite straight forward and easy to use. I am a musician myself and usually the sites that go along with musical products are overly complicated and look atrocious:

Source: http://www.gak.co.uk

As you can see here. This is GAK in Brighton's site. It is very, very busy. The content is all over the place and it is not really user friendly. It is OK to navigate after a little bit of practice using it but even then it is unnecessarily cluttered. 

Musicians have grown used to using sites and having a user experience like this and I think it would make quite an interesting challenge to re-jig the format and create something more modern and easy to use. This goes well with the wide age range. The younger end would be used to other more modern designed sites and the older end would appreciate an easy to use site that is self explanatory.

A lot of people attend music conferences too because of the collaborative nature of them too. It is a chance to catch up with old friends and make new ones. It is quite an open and friendly community with a lot of support nested within it. I think that the website should reflect that. This is a difficult balance to address though. As it is a professional setting for brands to market their new products and reach a wide audience in the flesh, a feat that is difficult to accomplish anywhere else.

Lastly I think that the predominant market for the NAMM show is male. I think this isn't as divisive as it once was but I do think that a lot of the people attending this show that the website will be aimed at are male. This will not have too drastic an effect on most of the choice as, like I said, I don't think that all the attendants will be male and that they are only slightly in the majority. However, it inevitably will effect some aspects of the design and language.

So all in all. This is my target audience for this website:

• Aged 20 - 50
• Musicians
• Creative
• Discerning 
• Friendly
• Communal
• Wealthy
• Predominantly Male

I think that this is quite a broad target audience but a conference like this is very difficult to narrow down. It is meant to be as open as possible as it is a platform for companies to display products. I think it is a good beginning though it really does help to clarify the direction I want to be heading and will help me make decisions later down the road.