Dylan Jones using this tool as his unique selling point to grapple the audience of men and this plays on the men’s aspirations and dreams to “look great, sleep with beautiful women and drive expensive cars.”
The magazine content mainly consists of fashion, cars, gadgets and half naked women, with a few current affair articles just to keep the reader interested in reality rather than a virtual utopia that the magazine creates.
To illustrate the audience’s aspirations, models are used, who are driving nice cars and are evidently very good looking. This re-enforces that the magazine is aspiration based as they’re no pictures of ordinary people or “average Joes.”
GQ magazine is informative, as it does involve a lot of fashion, male grooming and current affair facts, but this would bore an audience, so the magazine also contains a lot of escapism aspects such as agony aunt letters about men sleeping with several women at once, this letter was edited into the section of its escapism nature, this once again tries to tell the audience that how GQ lives their lives and that they are in Utopia.
The magazine is very successful in today’s market because it’s a very high quality magazine that won No.1 men’s magazine in the world. This means that it also beat high rival FHM. Comparing it so a female orientated magazine such as nuts GQ is on the complete other side of the spectrum, showing fashion, grooming and mostly classy information. Nuts on the other hand mostly show pictures of naked women everywhere and that’s how they pull in a big audience.
The design of the magazine also reflects it’s audience because the colours are either very manly colours such as blues, whites and red’s, or the colours reflect ones that are in fashion, such as more lighter colours as yellows and pinks.
The magazine is at the very high end of the market and it entails hundreds of adverts for mostly fashion designers e.g. Armani, Diesel, Prada, Ozwald Boateng. These are very high class designers and this just represents how big of an operation the magazine is because of all the advertising.
GQ magazine once again comes down to one common ideology “sex sells” and this has shown on the magazine, with its lack of average people and half naked girls it just shows that it is sex orientated.
