'Sugar' Magazine Analysis

Sugar Magazine Analysis

Sugar Cover Analysis The magazine ‘Sugar’ is aimed at teenage girls and focuses mainly on lifestyle. Its publisher ‘Attic Futuna’ is locked in a furiously competitive market and must constantly strive to make their magazine more appealing and thus more sellable. In order to do this, ‘Sugar’ has to stand out from other magazines such as ‘Q’ and Emap’s ‘Bliss’. To draw in more readers, the front cover uses bright contrasting colours and ironic subheadings such as ‘What every girl needs to know about snogging’ (This particular subheading appears to be aimed at hugely stereotypical heterosexual teenage females). The cover line’s promise to ‘get kissing confident’ places emphasis on the fact that it is aiming to attract a younger audience as it appears to be suggesting that readers have either never kissed anybody or are still lacking confidence when doing so, therefore we can draw the conclusion that those lacking ‘kissing experience’ are likely to be twenty five years old or younger. To make the cover line more interesting for readers, different font sizes are used for each word (‘Get’ is located above the other two words and uses the smallest font of the three, ‘kissing’ is located just below ‘get’ and has the largest font size and ‘confident’ is below ‘kissing’ and is in a slightly smaller font) and yellow is used to clearly stand out against the model and bright pink background. Emphases is placed on ‘kissing’ and ‘confident’ as they are seen as being desirable aspects of modern culture and are therefore likely to increase the likelihood of people purchasing the magazine thus benefiting the company responsible for the ‘Sugar’ magazine (‘Attic Futuna’).

The magazine's title ‘Sugar’ is easily identifiable for regular readers as the fonts size and position is the same for every issue, with the only differences between issues being the colour, texture and whether it is located behind the model or not. Above of title on this cover is a short piece of text advertising a contest and Sugar’s website ‘Win £500 on sugarmagazine.co.uk’. The £500 prize money will intrigue the audience and is likely to draw in buyers of the magazine and people whom have simply seen the magazine cover on the shelves of shops, therefore bringing in new readers and making regulars feel rewarded for their interest in ‘Sugar’. This particular cover also takes advantage of the male gaze via the use of an ‘attractive’ model and the subheading ‘Anna Hathaway “Secretly, I’m really a bad girl”’. The sexual connotations of ‘bad girl’ appeal to males and are therefore likely to increase sales of the magazine as males shall purchasing it to see how exactly the model is a ‘bad girl’. The image of this model is conventional for the genre of magazine as she is older than the target audience and is likely to be seen as a role model. Her confident and inviting smile is likely to reinforce the idea that the magazine is aiming to be a friendly and something that audiences may relate to. In addition to this, she provides a great contrast to the plain pink background and makes the magazine feel more appealing and professional.