Question

Why is knowing your audience an important part of capturing and maintaining their attention? What is the impact of cultural diversity in your audience?

Answer 1

• Your goal in speaking to a group is to either inform, persuade or entertain them. To achieve any or all of those objectives, you should know their interests, likes and dislikes.Audience analysis involves identifying the audience and adapting a speech to their interests, level of understanding, attitudes, and beliefs.
• Taking an audience-centered approach is important because a speaker's effectiveness will be improved if the presentation is created and delivered in an appropriate manner.
• You want to analyze your audience prior to your speech so that during the speech you can create a link between you, the speaker, and the audience. You want to be able to figuratively step inside the minds of audience members to understand the world from their perspectives. Through this process, you can find common ground with your audience, which allows you to align your message with what the audience already knows or believes.
• Speakers assess the audience’s attitude – a positive or negative evaluation of people, objects, event, activities, or ideas – toward a specific topic or purpose. The attitudes of the audience may vary from extremely negative to extremely positive, or completely ambivalent.
• By examining the preexisting beliefs of the audience regarding the speech’s general topic or particular purpose, speakers have the ability to persuade the audience members to buy into the speaker’s argument. This can also help with speech preparation.
• Audiences around the world are all different.Cultural, social and religious differences impact on how people learn,take in information and interact with presenters.
• If you are presenting in a foreign country, it is important to understand the cultural differences of the audience. How do they dress? How is their sense of humor? How do they typically communicate? What gestures are appropriate or inappropriate? Are there religious factors that should be considered?
• The more you find out about your audience, the more you can adapt your message to the interests, values, beliefs, and language level of the audience. Once you collect data about your audience, you are ready to summarize your findings and select the language and structure that is best suited to your particular audience.