How do football magazines
‘Four Four Two’ and ‘Match!’ use different language to maintain and further
develop their audience?
Nowadays, a lot of the British public seem to have turned
their attention to the use of the internet in order to find out the latest news
and reviews in the world of football. But despite this, there are still the
regular magazines managing to maintain their sales figures. ‘Match!’ with a current average weekly circulation of
72,861 in the UK[1], and “Four Four Two” magazine, as of June 2012,
had 631,000 readers worldwide[2], in countries including Malaysia,
Brazil, Vietnam and of course, Great Britain.
So for my investigation, I
have compared these two magazines – ‘Four Four Two’ and ‘Match!’ for several
reasons. From my research, I have found that first and foremost, they are the
two highest-selling magazines in the UK[3] and as well, they are
both aimed at different age-ranged audiences(Four Four two – 18-40[4],
Match! – 11-14[5]). Also, a good similarity between them that is
helpful for my investigation is that they were both released within 3 days of
each other and therefore they both contain the same latest news to compare
which made them much easier to compare.
The theorist that I am
looking at is ‘David Ogilvy’, who was hailed as the “father of advertising”, said
that certain words can be used to attract the audience’s attention. These words
include qualifiers like ‘new’ and ‘free’, with also verbs like ‘buy’. This is
something that will most likely be found on the front cover, and I will
quantify the usage by both magazines. He also said that other techniques used
by magazines include things like the use of puns, alliteration, assonance,
onomatopoeia and rhyme. Away from language, I also will look at the use of
graphology in the magazines, to see how consistently they use images – and how
effectively they use them.
Also, to compare the
difference between the two in terms of language used, I decided to find a
couple of articles that are the same/very similar within them and quantify the
number of polysyllabic words used. I did this with three articles so that I
obtained reliable data. I had originally expected that as a result of doing
this, I would find that ‘Four Four Two’ had a significantly higher use of these
words - compared to the jargon in ‘Match!’
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Match_(magazine)
[2] http://www.mediauk.com/magazines/42220/four-four-two/readership-figures
[3] http://www.w3newspapers.com/magazines/soccer/
[4] http://magazineindustry.wikispaces.com/file/view/foufourtwo+case+study_Alex.doc
[5] http://magazines.bauermediaadvertising.com/magazines/detail/match
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