Initial thoughts . . .

Aim : Create an idea for a campaign that will get more students to buy 'i' newspaper. 

Yesterday me and my team mate Vivienne met up to discuss our initial thoughts on the newspaper. Before this, we had decided over Facebook we were to each buy a copy of the paper to find any obvious problems, paying attention to whereabouts on the shop shelf it was located and its placement next to other news papers. 

I purchased my paper from the supermarket Tesco. It was located on the bottom shelf in-between the newspapers The Independent and The Herald. At first i found it hard to find because it was about 4pm and by this point all the newspapers had been shuffled around, making the "i" logo hard to spot as it only takes up the top right corner , rather that the usual straight across header of other newspapers. Also the back cover is just one huge advertisement , with no inclination of what newspaper it is.  This could potentially help us promote sales if in our campaign we added a small proposal of changing its placement on a shop shelf and back/front layout. 

   Mobile photo of Tescos Magazine rack. 

 I had previously heard before that the whole point of 'i' was that it is a quick snappy read for those who had little time to read full articles in other papers. This point was addressed by a header along the top "Britain's first and only concise quality newspaper' , however personally this was not obvious enough. 

Inside the paper i found the concept of splitting the information into different colour coded sections (News , views , TV , IQ , Business & Sport) a nice touch when it came to ease of reading. However, as a young student (target audience)  these headings lacked excitement and could be more specific. For example : "Games&Movies" or "Nightlife" or anything that an average student would do in their spare time. 

After we discussed the paper itself we did some research on i's online facilities. We found that they had a twitter and a subscription only website. However, they had no facebook/youtube/website/blog committed to 'i' alone , only a page in The Independent's website and youtube channel. We thought this wasn't enough, especially if you want to promote student sales. Even more now with the new Independent , Herald and other newspaper Facebook app a lot of my friends and i are now using that allows you to read articles online and see what others are reading too.