Socio-economic Grouping

Socio-economic grouping is when you are placed into a category based on either your status or job. This method of looking at people is very dated and untrue as it only looks at people on an individual scale and not their living conditions etc.

When looking at my target audience I have to take this into account when deciding exactly what i'm aiming towards when selling to my audience. Originally, I said that my target audience would be of only the ABC1 category, but after looking in these categories in detail I need to make alterations.

The category of A only consists of  landed gentry, large business owners etc. These people are known as the upper middle class. The next band down of people are called the middle class which sits them in band B. These people usually consist of professional working people or people who are high up in the army. Next two bands are C1 and C2. C1, also known as lower middle class, consists of professional admin workers. C2 then jumps down to people who are in 'skilled working', these people include: plumbers, carpenters, roofers, 'white van man' etc. The last two bands of people are D and E. D is classed as 'working class' in which people work with no or little skill in their job - these jobs include supermarket workers, cleaners etc. The final band of people, E, contains people who aren't employed or students.

This way of categorising people, as I have previously said, is an old and inaccurate way in placing people. This method of categorising doesn't take in to the equation what these peoples backgrounds are like, their hobbies or their personalities. This method only really takes in what your job is, then from this placing you in an unfair hierarchy. I have therefor decided that the band of people for my target audience doesn't matter, as each band is filled with people with the same tastes in music. So i'm not going to base my target audience on any particular set of bands from this method but will focus more on

what peoples hobbies are and what type of person would truly buy this. For example, a person of age between 15-21, loves acoustic music, likes bands such as Jake Bugg or Oasis and would like to buy a magazine with similar bands to these.