Research: Match! Magazine

I have chosen to Match magazine, Match! magazine was first published in 1979.  It is a British football magazine aimed at the teenage and pre-teenage market. The magazine includes interviews, a skills school, quizzes and a weekly round-up of results, tables and player ratings from the four main English divisions and the Scottish Premier League in match facts. It mostly covers teams and players in the English Premier League, but also has a limited coverage of La Liga, Serie A and international football. The magazine has a current circulation of 57,108 as of December 2010. Match's current average weekly circulation of 72,861 and is 15,753 down from its figure of 12 months earlier. Match! magazine when it was first published, had one competitor in Shoot magazine but due to the increased sales of Match! magazine the magazine Shoot closed in June 2008 due to their sales not being high enough. This showed how well Match! were doing compared to their competitors but due to Shoot closing down a new magazine came into the frame in BBC’s Match of the Day magazine. This magazine was first produced in February 2008 and after a fierce marketing battle, Match of the Day magazine overtook the Match! magazine in the period of January to December period due to more sales.

Since then FourFourTwo magazine has now become the biggest selling football magazinein the UK, selling 90,077 copies but aimed at an adult sports audience instead of the teenage and pre-teenage years that Match! magazine aims at. While Match remains a strong brand in the teenage football magazine market, its circulation seems unlikely to again reach its 200,000-plus heights of the mid 1990s.

The Magazine’s Publisher

The company that publishes this magazine is Bauer Media Group. Bauer Media Group is a large German publishing company that publishes a worldwide circulation of 38 million magazines a week. Match! magazine has website and uses social networking sites such as Facebook and Twitter to get to a wider audience of people which in turn would get more sales, the website is http://www.matchmag.co.uk/ and the Facebook and Twitter sites are: www.facebook.com/matchmagazine and www.twitter.com/matchmagazine.

Convergence and Synergy

In 1983-85, Match! ran a weekly comic called ‘Cannon’. This was initially created and written by Steve McGarry, it featured fictional adventures of football players who were in the news. This comic was axed and then bought back in 2011 with the name ‘Match Xtra’ in order to try and revive their number one spot in this market. 

Technological Convergence and Consumption

Match! also has a website as well as it’s magazine. The website though is not a very big website and therefore doesn’t include that much information on it that would maybe included in the published magazine. In fact, the website does not include any of the information that would be included in the magazine, only the front cover of the latest issue of the magazine, the reason that Bauer have done this is as they want their customers to buy the magazine, which obviously adds to the sales, rather than seeing the content on the website which does not make the company any money as it is free. On the website it allows people to buy a subscription to the magazine and it also allows to users to sign up to receive a free Match! newsletter, enter competitions, it gives direct links to video to watch via ‘Youtube!’.

Relationship between Encoder and Decoder

The relationship between the encoder and decoder is very much one way due to the target audience being very young. The website allows users to ‘like’ the page through Facebook or ‘follow’ the page through Twitter and when the customers are on these social media sites they are able to leave comments on the page, these comments are normally reviews on the most recent issue of the magazine or whether or not they enjoy the magazine in general but, due to the young age of the audience they are unable to do this as they are too young to use the social networking sites.

Content

The way Match! magazine attract their target audience is by offering free things that are included in the magazine itself and the themes that they use. The main theme is obviously based around football and they use informal text to make it more interesting for the readers to read. Match! also include many offers like free posters that are included in the magazine every week, they also include things such as competitions that give the readers a chance to win free products that may help them in their footballing career.