5.2: Why Conduct An Audience Analysis
Angela Pettitt
Learning Objectives
- Understand how to choose a worthwhile topic.
- Explain how to adapt your speech to your audience’s needs.
- 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, it is important to choose a topic that is engaging and important to your fellow classmates. And, with little bit of research, you can ensure that even the most informed audience members will learn something.
To begin, consider topics that are current and emerging. What is changing? What do you think should be on students’ radar that isn’t?
You can also think about issues are overlooked, under-represented, or misunderstood. What additional information or perspective can you offer? Where can you add a new angle to a familiar topic?
In short, topics that add to existing knowledge, deepen a conversation, or that require the audience to consider a new perspective will be more likely to hold their interest than something they’ve heard about time and time again.
An audience analysis will help you learn what your audience already knows about various topics, what they think about it, and how they might respond to 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. In other words, nothing is worse than a speaker who tries to impress the audience with unnecessarily complex language. It is far more important to confirm whether the occasion calls for language that is more formal, technical, or academic, or if a casual, or colloquial, approach is needed to clearly deliver your message. An advanced vocabulary might be required when presenting to an elite audience in a university setting but might seem pretentious and aloof at work.
The structure of your speech also contributes to its clarity. State your topic clearly at the outset, using words that your audience will understand. Briefly explain what they can expect from your speech, as that 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 to avoid confusing or misleading people. And always be careful when using jargon or “insider” language that might exclude listeners who aren’t “in the know.”
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.
Lastly, whether or not your audience shares your understanding of idioms and colloquial expressions affects your clarity. Many idioms are culturally-based and time-specific, so knowing your audience will help you determine if such language is appropriate and will be understood.
In conclusion, audience analysis will enable you to identify an engaging, relevant message and ensure your audience can relate to and understand your point.
Controversial Topics Are Important and Risky
Some of the most interesting topics are often controversial 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. When addressing a controversial topics, you need to investigate the voices speaking both in favor and against each side, 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 point to past disasters as proof that the risk is too great. Industry leaders might view the issue economically and believe that nuclear energy will be quite lucrative; engineers might see it as an opportunity to modernize energy supply; conservationists are likely concerned about the impact on the environment; and politicians might weigh concerns about safety risks against alleviating reliance on foreign oil. So even though the topic is extremely controversial, there are far more than two binary positions, and many people might hold multiple (and even conflicting) perspectives. Therefore, understanding your audience will help you anticipate arguments and craft a nuanced speech that is sensitive to the values and needs of those listening to you.
Beyond the Podium Insight
On hot-button issues, audience analysis helps you frame disagreement without dismissal. You can name value conflicts, acknowledge tradeoffs, and still invite shared problem-solving.
Controversial topics are important to address, but they require careful research and consideration for the strong feelings involved. If your audience has widely diverse views, take the time to acknowledge them. 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 tastes better. In other cases, your audience might include retirees living on fixed incomes who feel another tax levy 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 the process of learning all you reasonably can about your audience is so centrally important.
Demographics
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 posts 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 clichéd stereotypes, but they still demonstrate 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 all 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, access to resources, and a newfound interest in pediatric healthcare. In contrast, if your audience is a group of maternity ward nurses, their education and occupation will be more apparent and relevant than income or age. They will also know more about the topic than the new parents, so the topics most relevant to new parents will be old news for nurses. Lastly, if you are addressing a city council that is considering whether to fund a children’s health clinic, your audience is likely to have very mixed demographics but will share an interest in assessing whether the clinic is a worthy 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 exemplary care for their patients. In a city council meeting, early childhood health care may be a highly personal issue for some listeners while strictly a matter of dollars and cents for others.
Consider Audience Diversity
Diversity is a key dimension of audience analysis. While the term “diversity” is often used to refer to racial and ethnic minorities, audiences can be diverse in many 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, White people still occupy a disproportionate number of leadership roles, and people of color are more likely to face discrimination in employment, housing, healthcare, and education. Women still earn significantly less than men in comparable careers, face sexual harassment in the workplace, and are significantly under- represented in government roles. Members of the LGBTQ community still endure hostile reactions from segments of the public even as they gain rights and visibility in broader society. And we only recently began considering 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 who 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. If a speaker is talking about American history and only refers to colonists or settlers and ignores the history of indigenous people who were already present, or enslaved people who did not come willingly, then they are signaling that the history of those groups isn’t important. Audience members who descended from those groups will notice and may feel excluded.
Acknowledging that demographic categories can affect our experiences and perspectives is an important step toward effective communication.
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 an affluent 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.
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.
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. 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:
- Be accurate; present the facts accurately.
- Be aware of the emotional impact; make sure that you don’t manipulate feelings.
- Avoid hateful words; refrain from language that disparages or belittles people.
- 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. 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 is 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 their needs and interests? Is your topic relevant and appropriate for them?
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.
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. Even if you’ve given this issue little thought up to now, you are ethically beholden to examine your motives and the integrity of your research and message.
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.
