34 Audience Analysis
Qing Mao
Audience analysis is a task performed at the early stages of preparing a public speech. A speaker needs to assess the audience to make sure the information provided to them is at the appropriate level.
What You’ll Learn:
- How to analyze the audience
- How to determine the purpose of your speech
Your audience’s needs determine your word choice and tone.
Before you give a speech, ask yourself: Who’s your audience? What’s the appropriate tone and mood? How do you achieve your purpose by responding to your audience’s needs?
Look at these two scenarios. Answer these questions: Who’s the audience? What language is used? What’s the tone? What does the audience expect?
“That patient is suffering from separation anxiety disorder. I’d like to try cognitive behavioural therapy.”
“It’s okay, sweetie. Don’t cry. Your mama will be back soon.”
(Engkent, 2011, p. 3)
In the first scenario, the audience is a specialist. Medical jargon is used to describe the patient’s symptoms and treatment. The tone is calm and professional. The audience wants to hear the doctor’s diagnosis.
In the second scenario, the audience is a child. Very simple language is used. The tone is comforting and reassuring. The audience wants to be assured that mother will come back soon.
If you don’t fully understand the first scenario, you’ll surely understand what’s happened to the patient after looking at the second scenario. The patient is a child who is crying because the mother is away.
How to Analyze the Audience
What’s audience analysis?
When you analyze your audience, you identify your audience members’ attitudes, beliefs, level of understanding, and interests to understand the world from their perspectives. This can help you determine the content of your speech, what language to use, and listener expectations. You can tailor your message to the needs of the listener to communicate more effectively.
Approaches to audience analysis
| DEFINITION | SCENARIO | |
|---|---|---|
| Situational Analysis | Consider the time and place of a speech, the audience size, and the speaking occasion. | Giving a talk in a meeting room with the capacity of 20 people or in an auditorium that holds 1,000 people means entirely different expectations for a speaker. Temperature, size of the room, the level of surrounding noise, time of day are some factors that influence the audience’s desire to listen. A speaker needs to find out these factors ahead of time to resolve these issues appropriately. |
| Demographic Analysis | “Whenever addressing an audience, it is generally a good idea to know about its age, gender, major, year in school, race, ethnicity, religion, et cetera” (DeCaro, Adams, & Jefferis, n.d.). Knowing these details, you can include useful and relevant information to engage your audience. | Talking to a group of 25–35 year olds about economic development after World War II is a different experience from talking about the same topic to a group of 55–65 year olds. People from the older group are more likely to feel connected to the topic. The speaker needs to include more background knowledge while addressing the younger audience. Alternatively, the speaker can ask the younger audience to do some research on the topic before the speech. |
| Psychological Analysis | Understand what beliefs and attitudes your audience already have regarding your topic. “It’s always important to know where your audience stands on the issues you plan to address ahead of time” (DeCaro, Adams, & Jefferis, n.d.). | Suppose you’re giving a talk about environmental protection to a group of economists. Very likely they hold the idea that a strong economy is key to human development. In this case, you may want to start your speech by providing facts and examples to prove that unsustainable economic growth is responsible for the depletion of natural resources, animal extinction, and excessive greenhouse gases. This can give you credibility and help you gain the trust of the audience. |
| Multicultural Analysis | Be aware of cultural differences. Become a culturally effective speaker. The capacity to appreciate other cultures can help you build common ground with audience members from diverse ethnic backgrounds. | Your topic may not be shared among other cultures. Avoid sensitive topics. Also, be careful with humour. It can be risky to tell jokes when you address a multicultural audience. What’s funny in one culture may be taboo or incomprehensible in another. |
| Topic Interest and Prior Knowledge | You need to know ahead what prior knowledge your audience has. You don’t want to present information that your audience already knows. You want to sound resourceful, knowledgeable, and confident. | If you are giving a talk on “Overcoming Cyber-Bullying” to parents, consider what they may already know about cyber-bullying and what they need to know to support and protect their children. You may want to define technical terms and concepts that aren’t mainstream such as “trolling” or “flaming.” You may avoid giving a history of the internet or defining social media because your audience is familiar with these things. |
You can learn more in this University of Pittsburgh page on Audience Analysis.
Try it!
Watch the TED Talk “You Don’t Find Happiness, You Create It” by Katarina Blom, a psychologist and the first author to publish a Swedish book on positive psychology. Pay attention to her tone, body language, word choice, sentence structure, and audience management.
Choose the better answers to the following questions.
Public Speaking Statistics
When a speaker does all the talking without giving the audience an opportunity to participate, audience engagement drops by 14%.
Adding facts and figures to a presentation increases audience retention by 20% (Allison, 2018).
Before you begin to draft your speech, it is important to analyze your audience to tailor your speech to their needs.
Analyzing the Audience
Situational analysis
Demographic analysis
Psychological analysis
Multicultural analysis
Topic interest and prior knowledge
References
See Audience Analysis References
Customize a message with a specific audience in mind.
