5.2: Why Conduct An Audience Analysis

Learning Objectives

1. Understand the value of acknowledging our audience.
2. Understand how to choose a worthwhile topic.
3. Explain how to adapt your speech to your audience’s needs.
4. Explain the value of speaking with credibility.

Acknowledge the Audience

Picture yourself in front of the audience, about to deliver your speech. This is the moment when your relationship with your audience begins, and the quality of this relationship will influence how receptive they will be to your ideas, or at least how willing they’ll be to listen to what you have to say. One of the best ways to initiate this relationship is by finding a way to acknowledge your audience. This can be as simple as establishing eye contact and thanking them for coming to hear your presentation. If they’ve braved bad weather, are missing a world-class sports event, or are putting up with an inconvenience such as a stuffy conference room, tell them how much you appreciate their presence in spite of the circumstances. This can go a long way toward getting them “on board” with your message.

For a political candidate who is traveling from town to town giving what may be perceived as the same campaign speech time and time again, a statement like “It’s great to be here in Springfield, and I want to thank the West Valley League of Women Voters and our hosts, the Downtown Senior Center, for the opportunity to be with you today” lets the audience know that the candidate has at least taken the trouble to tailor the speech to the present audience. Stephanie Coopman and James Lull tell us that Microsoft chairman Bill Gates often adapts to his audiences by thanking them for their participation in the computer industry or for their preparation to participate in an electronic world. The authors say, “Even those brief acknowledgments let audience members know that Gates had prepared his speech with them in mind” (Coopman & Lull, 2009). We will cover audience acknowledgment further in Chapter 10.

Tailoring Your Topic

Oftentimes, your topic is semi-determined by your role or purpose for speaking in a particular environment. For instance, if you are a pre-k teacher speaking at an early education conference, you probably wouldn’t choose to speak about international trafficking or the need to spay and neuter pets. If you are endorsing a candidate for office, you will certainly want to speak about something related to that candidate rather than something outside the scope of their campaign. However, in both cases, there are myriad topics you can choose within the boundaries of what might be relevant, and your selection should reflect the knowledge, interests, needs, priorities, and values of your audience. Although there is no universal list of good or bad topics, you have an ethical responsibility to select a topic that will be interesting and relevant to your audience.

The classroom is no different. As a student delivering a speech in class, you will likely consider your fellow students as your audience, and it is important to choose a topic that is engaging and important to them. Sure, you might know a lot of detailed, complex, or technical information about a particular topic, but will your audience find it impossible to understand? Likewise, you might be tempted to choose an easy topic that most people in the audience already know about, but it might make them feel like you are wasting their time with a speech that is too obvious or simple. These are easy and understandable temptations to save time and effort, but the result is a speech that doesn’t achieve its objective. For example, if the purpose of your speech is to inform or persuade students in your public speaking class, topics such as campus parking problems, the Greek system (campus fraternities and sororities), or credit card responsibility may be easy to address, but they probably reiterate information and perspectives students have already heard. It will be obvious that you opted for ease rather than substance. To avoid this trap, seek a topic that will be novel and interesting both for you and your audience. You should also conduct some credible research to ensure that even the most informed audience members will learn something from you. Consider topics that are current and emerging. What do you think should be on students’ radar that isn’t? What issues are overlooked, under-represented, or misunderstood? Where can you add a new perspective to a familiar topic? Topics that add to an ongoing conversation or that require the audience to consider new information will be more likely to hold their interest than something they’ve heard about time and time again.

Keep in mind, your audience will not have the same set of knowledge that you do. It’s important to define any jargon or terminology that might be unfamiliar to a broad audience. Your audience analysis will help you consider how your audience will respond to you, your topic, and your message.

Clarity

Nothing is more lamentable than a rhetorical actor who endeavors to make grandiose the impressions of others through the utilization of an elephantine albeit nonsensical argot—a.k.a., nothing is worse than a speaker who tries to impress the audience with a giant vocabulary that no one understands. In the first portion of the preceding sentence, we pulled out as many polysyllabic words as we could find. Unfortunately, most people will just find the sentence wordy and the meaning will pass right over their heads. As such, we as public speakers must ensure that we are clear in what we say.

Make sure that you state your topic clearly at the outset, using words that your audience will understand. Letting them know what to expect from your speech shows consideration for them as listeners and lets them know that you value their time and attention.

Throughout your speech, define your terms clearly and carefully in order to avoid misleading or alarming people by mistake. Be careful not to use jargon or “insider” language that will exclude listeners who aren’t “in the know.” If you approach audience analysis in haste, you might find yourself presenting a speech with no clear message. You might avoid making any statements outright from fear of offending. It is much better to know to whom you’re speaking and to present a clear, decisive message that lets listeners know what you think.

Beyond the Podium Insight: Knowing your audience isn’t flattery. It’s ethics. Attending to identities, needs, and histories signals respect and reduces harm. In classrooms, councils, and community meetings, analysis helps you include voices that are often missed.

Controversial Topics Are Important and Risky

Some of the most interesting topics are controversial. They are controversial topics because people have deeply felt values and beliefs about the problem, issue, or solution, which makes it crucial that you understand the various facets of the controversy. You will need to investigate the voices speaking both in favor and against a particular topic, as well as those proposing alternatives or compromises to the general pro/con binary. For instance, many people perceive nuclear energy to be a clean, reliable, and much- needed source of energy. Others say that even the mining of uranium is harmful to the environment, that we lack satisfactory solutions for storing nuclear waste, and that nuclear power plants are vulnerable to errors and attacks. Another group might view the issue economically, believing that industry needs nuclear energy. Engineers might believe that if the national grid could be modernized, we would have enough energy, and that we should strive to use and waste less energy until modernization is feasible. Some might feel deep concern about our reliance on foreign oil. Others might view nuclear energy as more tried-and-true than other alternatives. The topic is extremely controversial, and yet it is interesting and very important. Therefore, understanding your audience will help you anticipate arguments and craft a speech that is sensitive to the values and needs of those listening to you.

Controversial topics are important to address, but they require careful research and consideration for the strong feelings involved. Moreover, how you treat your audience is just as important as how you treat your topic. If your audience has widely diverse views, take the time to acknowledge the concerns they have. Remember, they are intelligent people, and you will have more success informing or persuading them if you respect the views they bring to the conversation.

Adapt Your Speech to Audience Needs

When preparing a speech for a classroom audience consisting of other students and your professor, you may feel that you know their interests and expectations fairly well. However, we learn public speaking in order to be able to address all audiences in hopes we can do some good. In some cases, your audience might consist of young children who don’t care that eggs are healthier than cereal, because the cereal tases better. In other cases, your audience might include retirees living on fixed incomes who feel another tax increase would be more burdensome to them than beneficial to the community.

Even in an audience that appears to be homogeneous—composed of people who are very similar to one another—different listeners will understand the same ideas in different ways. Every member of every audience has his or her own frame of reference—the unique set of perspectives, experience, knowledge, and values belonging to every individual. An audience member who has been in a car accident caused by a drunk driver might not appreciate a lighthearted joke about barhopping. Similarly, stressing the importance of graduate school might be discouraging to audience members who don’t know whether they can even afford to stay in college to complete an undergraduate degree.

These examples illustrate why audience analysis—the process of learning all you reasonably can about your audience—is so centrally important. Audience analysis includes consideration of demographic information, such as the gender, age range, marital status, race, ethnicity, and socio-economic status of the people in your audience. And each of these has various sub-groups that influence how people might respond to a topic. For instance, socioeconomic status includes a combination of characteristics such as income, wealth, level of education, and occupational prestige.

Race is sometimes linked to religious affiliation and immigration status. Each of these dimensions give you some information about which kinds of topics, and which aspects of various topics, will be well received and which you might have to work harder to defend.

Advertisers use this kind of information all the time to determine how best to reach a particular audience, such as targeting older generations through TV ads while tailoring social media ads to appeal to teens. Car companies are notorious for featuring rugged men hauling construction equipment in their truck ads, while they showoff the family-friendly features of minivans with images of moms juggling kids and groceries. These examples might seem like cliched stereotypes, but they still influence how a communicator attempts to reach a particular receiver.

For our purposes, suppose you are preparing to give an informative speech about early childhood health care. If your audience is a group of couples who have each recently had a new baby and who live in an affluent suburb, you might expect that they will be young adults with high socioeconomic status, and they will likely be eager to know about the very best available health care for their children, whether they are healthy or have various medical problems. In contrast, if your audience is a group of nurses, they may differ in age, race, and religion, but they will be similar in education and occupational prestige. They will likely know more about the topic than the new parents, so you will want to find an aspect that may be unfamiliar to them, such as community health care resources for families with limited financial resources or for referring children with special needs. Lastly, if you are addressing a city council committee that is considering whether to fund a children’s health clinic, your audience is likely to have very mixed demographics and not everyone will agree this is a necessary use of public funds.

Audience analysis also takes into account what market researchers call psychographic information, which is more personal and more difficult to predict than demographics. Psychographic information involves the beliefs, attitudes, and values that your audience members embrace. Respecting your audience means that you avoid offending, excluding, or trivializing the beliefs and values they hold. Returning to the topic of early childhood health care, you can expect new parents to be passionate about wanting the best for their child. The psychographics of a group of nurses would revolve around their professional competence and the need to provide “standard of care” for their patients. In a city council committee meeting, the topic of early childhood health care may be a highly personal and emotional issue for some of your listeners, while for others it may be strictly a matter of dollars and cents.

Consider Audience Diversity

Diversity is a key dimension of audience membership and, therefore, of audience analysis. While the term “diversity” is often used to refer to racial and ethnic minorities, audiences can be diverse in many other ways. Being mindful of diversity means being respectful of all people and striving to avoid racism, ethnocentrism, sexism, ageism, elitism, and other prejudicial assumptions.

The United States is full of social contradictions. Society today is more racially diverse than it has ever been. However, people who identify as white still occupy a disproportionate number of leadership roles in both government and business, and people of color are more likely to face discrimination in employment, housing, healthcare, and education. While women outnumber men as both undergraduate and graduate students, they still earn significantly less in comparable careers, face sexual harassment in the workplace, and are wildly under-represented in leadership roles. Members of the LGBTQ community still endure hostile and even violent reactions from the members of the general public even as they gain rights and visibility in broader society. Further, we are only recently beginning to consider the impact of mental health and neurodiversity such as Autism Spectrum Disorder and ADHD on daily life. Taken all together, every audience likely includes members of various minority groups that have faced discrimination, prejudice, dismissal, or neglect and who therefore will appreciate a speaker who acknowledges and respects them.

Even when an audience might appear on the surface to be homogenous, such as the parents group mentioned earlier, a smart speaker will remember there might be single parents, or same-sex or interracial couples in the room who are not always welcome and accepted. Referring only to “mom and dad” might send the message that the speaker does not consider alternative families to be “normal” or “legitimate.”

If a speaker is talking about American history and only refers to colonists or settlers while ignoring the history of indigenous people who were already present, or enslaved people who did not come willingly, then you are signaling that the historical record of white, European Americans is more official than other groups. Audience members who descended from those other groups will notice and may feel excluded.

Consider how women in the audience may feel if a male speaker at a seminar for first-time homebuyers tries to use gender stereotypes for humor by routinely “joking” that “everyone knows” women are difficult, indecisive, or picky when looking at homes. Chanes are, he actively offended the women in the audience and lost their business with what he said, but his unspoken stereotype that men are passive or uninterested in homebuying and/or decorating will also not be well received by most of the males in the room.

Invisible differences

While gender, race, and culture may be relatively visible aspects of diversity, there are many other aspects that are less obvious, so your audience is often more diverse than you might initially think. Suppose you are going to give a talk on pool safety to residents of a very affluent suburban community—will all your audience members be wealthy? Of course not. There might be some who are unemployed, some who are behind on their mortgage payments, some who live in rented rooms, not to mention some who work as babysitters or housekeepers. Furthermore, even if your listeners have some characteristics in common, it doesn’t mean that they all think alike. An audience that consists of military families won’t all have identical beliefs about national security, and members of a Bible study group may have very different opinions about which parts of the book are most important.

This is where the frame of reference becomes important. People have a wide variety of reasons for making the choices they make and for doing the things they do. For instance, a business student knows that profitability is important but still might have a strong interest in green lifestyles, low energy use, and alternative energy sources, areas of economic development that might require a great deal of investment before profits are realized. In fact, some business students may want to be involved in a paradigm shift away from “business as usual.”

These examples illustrate how important it is to use audience analysis to avoid stereotyping—assuming people with a certain characteristic in common have the same likes, dislikes, values, beliefs, interests, and/or abilities. All members of our audiences deserve to have the same sensitivity and the same respect extended to them as unique individuals. Respecting diversity is not merely a responsibility within public speaking; it should be a responsibility we strive to embrace in all our human interactions.

Avoid Offending Your Audience

It might seem obvious that speakers should use audience analysis to avoid making offensive remarks, but even very experienced speakers sometimes forget this basic rule. Imagine if a white elected official addressing a Latino audience made a joke about a Mexican American person’s name sounding similar to the name of a popular brand of tequila. In fact, a state governor did just that in June 2011. Not surprisingly, news organizations covering the event reported that the joke fell flat (Shahid, 2011). People are members of groups they didn’t choose and can’t change. We didn’t choose our race, ethnicity, sex, age, sexual orientation, intellectual potential, or appearance. We already know that jokes aimed at people because of their membership in these groups are not just politically incorrect but also ethically wrong.

Scholars Samovar and McDaniel tell us that ethical language choices require four guidelines:

1. Be accurate; present the facts accurately.
2. Be aware of the emotional impact; make sure that you don’t manipulate feelings.
3. Avoid hateful words; refrain from language that disparages or belittles people.
4. Be sensitive to the audience; know how audience members prefer to be identified (e.g., Indigenous instead of Indian, women instead of girls, people of color instead of colored people, disabled instead of crippled) (Samovar & McDaniel, 2007).

If you alienate your audience, they will stop listening. They will refuse to accept your message, no matter how true or important it is. They might even become hostile. If you fail to recognize the complexity of your audience members and if you treat them as stereotypes, they will resent your assumptions and doubt your credibility.

Ethical Speaking Is Sincere Speaking

Ethos is the term Aristotle used to refer to what we now call credibility: the perception that the speaker is honest, knowledgeable, and rightly motivated. Your ethos, or credibility, must be established as you build rapport with your listeners. Have you put forth the effort to learn who they are and what you can offer them in your speech? Do you respect them as individual human beings? Do you respect their values, history, culture, and experiences? Do you respect them enough to serve their needs and interests? Is your topic relevant and appropriate for them? Is your approach honest and sensitive to their preexisting beliefs? Your ability to answer these questions in a constructive way must be based on the best demographic and psychographic information you can use to learn about your listeners.

The audience needs to know they can trust the speaker’s motivations, intentions, and knowledge. They must believe that the speaker has no hidden motives, will not manipulate or trick them, has their best interests at heart, and is operating in good faith.

In order to convey regard and respect for the audience, you must be sincere. You must examine the motives behind your topic choice, the true purpose of your speech, and your willingness to do the work of making sure the content of the speech is true and represents reality. This can be difficult for students who face time constraints and multiple demands on their efforts. However, the attitude you assume for this task represents, in part, the kind of professional, citizen, parent, and human being you want to be. Even if you’ve given this issue little thought up to now, you can examine your motives and the integrity of your research and message construction. Ethically, you should.

Audience analysis requires that you adapt to the needs of your audience; this includes considering cultural diversity, making your message clear, avoiding offensive remarks, and speaking with sincerity.