Hypodermic model (passive consumption)

Harold Lasswell was a key figure in the development of understanding how media is consumed. In 1927 he wrote Propaganda Technique in the World War which “highlighted the brew of ‘subtle poison, which industrious men injected into the veins of a staggering people until the smashing powers . . . knocked them into submission’” – which effectively means, how did the leaders in the first world war convince civilians that war was worth fighting and that it was worth dying for?

Two Step Flow of Communication (active consumption)

At the same time Paul Lazarfeld recognised that a simple, linear model may not be sufficiently complex to understanding the relationship between message sent > message received. As such, in 1948 he developed the Two Step Flow model of communication.

QUANTITATIVE v QUALITATIVE

Approaches to audience theory will either adopt a QUANTITATIVE ie number based approach (so counting sales, audience figures, costs etc) OR QUALITATIVE (a more individual interpretative approach considering not how many, but why audiences consume or engage)

There are many different categories of people, as described by Young and Rubicam:

	RESEARCH PRODUCT 1 (Cristiano Ronaldo Shampoo)	RESEARCH PRODUCT 2 (Nivea Shampoo)	MY PRODUCT (Deodorant)
Quantitative	Middle/upper class, 16-25 year old men, lots of disposable income, relatively decent education	Middle class, 16-50 year old men, fair disposable income, fair education	Lower/Middle class, 12-40 year old males, fair amount of disposable income, fair education
Qualitative	Mainstreamer, Aspirer	Mainstreamer, Reformed	Mainstreamer, Struggler