If asked to draw the act of public speaking, what would you sketch? A person—maybe a stick figure—standing on a stage? Perhaps the figure would be holding a microphone or have a speech bubble? Or would they be sitting at a computer screen or talking into a phone? More importantly for this chapter, would you draw an audience? If so, how would you feature them? When we ask our students to visually depict public speaking, or rhetoric, they rarely think to include an audience. When they do, students typically draw an audience much smaller than, or positioned lower than, the speaker. Such depictions imply that public speaking is really an exercise of power over an audience by talking “at” them.

Today we know that model of public speaking is old-fashioned even if it still is a common first reaction. It simply doesn’t respect the integral and powerful role audiences play in public speaking. Discourse is not the sole creation or property of a speaker. Public speech only has meaning in its relationship to an audience that listens and responds to it. Recall that in chapter 1, we claimed that the listener has a role of equal, if not greater, importance than the speaker in providing rhetoric with meaning. As we stated there, meaning is ultimately negotiated between a rhetor and an audience, often over an extended period and in many different forms. In short, audiences are central to public speaking.

Consequently, this chapter focuses your attention on your audience. It comes relatively early in the textbook because good speakers take their specific audience into consideration at every stage of the speech process, including research, organization, outlining, and delivery. We begin with the importance of audience analysis and then consider the types of audiences to analyze, factors to consider, and the limitations of audience analysis in public speaking.

The Importance of Audience Analysis

Valuing your audience is critical not just to being more successful but also to inspiring audience members to work together to improve your communal life. When we value the audience for our speech, a host of questions must be answered. Who is my audience, and what is their reason for gathering or listening? What do I know about them, and what might they expect or need from my speech? To help answer these questions, we employ audience analysis. Audience analysis is the practice of assessing factors that are likely to influence an audience’s reception of a message.

Box 10.1 The Ancient Roots of Audience Analysis

We find references to audience analysis by ancient Greek philosophers and teachers such as Plato and Aristotle. In Phaedrus, Plato defined oratory as “the art of enchanting the soul” and encouraged speakers to “learn the difference among human souls” so speakers can alter their speeches accordingly.^[1] Several decades later, Aristotle gave the first description of audience types based largely on age, including their tendencies and likely beliefs, values, and motivations. Aristotle instructed speakers to analyze their listeners and select appeals that will best speak to their experiences, knowledge, and desires.

You experience audience analysis in your daily life, although perhaps not always with full awareness. If you read ESPN online, for instance, you are likely exposed to ads for athletic gear, sports betting, and technology. Peruse Glamour online, and you’ll more likely find ads for food (especially sweet treats), medication, and stores like Target. The products reflect the presumed interests of the magazines’ target audiences. Increasingly, ads on the internet are individually tailored to you. If you have recently shopped for a pair of Converse shoes online, for example, then you might suddenly find them advertised on another website you visit. We don’t find this surprising because audience-targeted advertising (audience analysis and adaptation) makes intuitive sense. It also makes our lives easier, since we don’t have to endure (as many) advertisements for products we don’t want.

Similarly, as a speaker you should critically assess your audience. However, we add a significant note of caution: Capitalist consumerism (like the advertisements we mentioned) and civic engagement begin from very different premises and can be at odds with one another. A speech is more than selling a product; ideally, it is about contributing to the public good. Just because something is effective, be it a marketing ploy or a persuasive message, does not guarantee that it is ethical. This differentiation influences our investigation of audience analysis, beginning with the multiple types of audiences you should consider.

Types of Audiences

We’ve referenced “the audience,” but who, exactly, do we mean? Who should you analyze? The answer is more complicated than it may seem! To illustrate, we will make three types of distinctions: direct and targeted audiences, discrete and dispersed audiences, and implied and implicated audiences.

Direct and Target Audiences

Your direct audience refers to the people who are exposed to and attend to your speech. If you speak in person, that may be easy to determine. It is everyone at the location who can hear you and is paying attention.

Of course, a direct audience won’t always be preassembled and ready to listen to you. If you’re lucky, a civic organization will invite you to address its members, or fellow community members will quickly respond to a recorded speech you upload. Much of the time, however, you may have to find or even build a direct audience to hear your message. Your efforts can range from requesting speaking time at a local meeting, to creating a public event and making publicity efforts to draw an audience, to even convincing others to help you pressure leaders to meet with and hear from you.

Once you have found or arranged a direct audience, it can be composed of people with diverse experiences and opinions. Thus, you might choose to focus on specific members who are more likely to be influenced by your appeals and/or more likely to act on them. We call them your target audience. If you are trying to convince your classmates to support a national ban on assault weapons, you might focus on—or target—those who adopt a more expansive or looser interpretation of the US Constitution’s Second Amendment.

Discrete and Dispersed Audiences

A second useful distinction is between discrete and dispersed audiences.^[2] In traditional, face-to-face public speaking, the audience is often limited to those individuals who show up for the event at a particular day and time—the audience is discrete. In other words, only the people who attended can see and hear the speech. Those who did not attend lose out on the opportunity.

When speaking online, however, your audience may be dispersed, unlimited by location or, perhaps, time if it’s recorded. A dispersed audience is more difficult to determine. If you become passionate about a local policy, for example, and upload a speech to YouTube and make it publicly available, the audience is dispersed because it’s unclear who will click the link. Geographically, people from your hometown as well as folks across the nation or even around the globe could watch it. In terms of time, viewers could click the link as soon as it’s available, and people could continue to find the speech as long as it remains a live, public link. With a dispersed audience, then, it can be difficult to make specific or timely references or calls to action because geographic locations and time differences may alter what individuals are able to do.

Reflecting on types of audiences can help you decide exactly who you should analyze and make adaptations for. If your direct audience is dispersed, for instance, identify whom you might target or even attempt to draw to your speech. If your direct audience is discrete, consider how you analyze the group while keeping in mind the subgroup(s) you particularly want to target.

Implied and Implicated Audiences

A third important distinction is the implied and implicated audiences.^[3] An implied audience is a group that is represented in your message, and an implicated audience is affected by your message if it succeeds.

Let’s use a state congressional hearing as an example. Imagine a group of congressional representatives and experts meeting to deliberate a bill that decreases environmental protections for a city in that state. An expert advocates passionately for the bill’s passage, noting that reducing the environmental protections would allow more businesses in the area to flourish. The speaker crafts an argument they think their target audience—the congressional representatives who are present—will find compelling.

However, there are also the

• implied audience of the business owners who are being spoken for, or represented in, the speech; and
• implicated audiences, those affected if the speaker is successful, including not only those business owners but also people who work for them or are looking for employment as well as residents who live in the area and local environmentalists. These audiences are important because they are impacted by the results of the speech but might not be part of the direct or target audiences.

It may seem odd to consider audiences who may not be physically or digitally present for your speech. After all, isn’t the target audience who you’re trying to inform or persuade? Yes, your target audience is important, whether they are discrete or dispersed. But the way you represent or depict groups, cultures, or individuals has lasting impacts, even outside your speech event. Similarly, the purposes you seek to fulfill, whether to inform or persuade the target audience, will affect individuals, groups, or cultures, especially if you successfully fulfill your purpose. Whomever your audience, we recommend you use the following guidance to analyze them.

Audience Analysis Factors

We’ve established that many types of audiences exist for any given speech. From this point on, we will refer again to “the audience” for the sake of simplicity. But when we do, you can substitute any of the types explored in the previous section. Paying attention to and learning about every audience will aid your speaking efforts.

So what should speakers learn about their audience to help adapt their messages? Audience analysis includes demographic, psychological, and environmental factors.

Demographic Factors

Demographic factors are personal characteristics that are likely to shape the audience’s views and perspectives on a topic. Audience demographics are useful in providing a sort of shorthand for audience interests and beliefs.

The age of an audience, for example, is a proxy for their experiences in life.

• If you attend a residential liberal arts college, the typical age of your classroom audience (eighteen to twenty-two years) means that few in your class likely have children or own their home. So if you want to address tax deductions, focusing on the child tax credit or mortgage deduction would probably be less relevant to this audience than examining deductions available for college tuition and school expenses. Likewise, a traditional college audience (ages eighteen to twenty-three) has a different range of experiences with the social world than more mature audiences.
• People in their sixties are more likely to be familiar with using pay phones or going to the library to access research sources. However, they are less likely to be familiar with TikTok, YouTube celebrities, or the most recent album by Harry Styles.

The point is that age is often a demographic signifier for a range of information about an audience, including experiences, personal concerns and interests, and cultural knowledge or awareness.

Other demographic characteristics can similarly be useful in thinking about how to approach a speech. For example, if you shared the results of a study you conducted on narcissism, you would approach it differently for a classroom of public speaking students as opposed to a room full of psychology professors at a national conference. The difference in their education would guide you toward altered language use (employing or avoiding specialized, scientific vocabulary terms) and level of detail (including or excluding supporting literature or an explanation of your methodology). The contrast in their education would give you hints about their likely interest in specific content and ability to understand concepts or terms.

Regardless of your topic, the questions to ask about your audience remain remarkably similar: What are the likely demographics of my audience? How might those demographic factors be important to their awareness, interest, needs, and predispositions on my topic? How can I use this demographic information to better relate to my audience, make my presentation more relevant and accurate, and encourage them to understand my perspective?

Limitations to Using Demographic Factors

There are some limitations in demographics-based audience analysis. A key concern is how much you can reasonably generalize before you create stereotypes about the audience. A stereotype is a generic categorization of individuals and groups based on the inaccurate conclusion that people sharing a particular characteristic will automatically possess similar qualities and beliefs. Remember that people—regardless of similarities such as age, gender, and race—are individuals. Thus, while there is some evidence that allows us to generalize possible views based on these sorts of demographic factors, any individual can defy that generalized pattern.

Also, each of us has multiple demographic features that intersect in ways that influence our standpoint. In chapter 7, we introduced standpoint theory, which suggests that our social identities influence how we are treated and our knowledge of the world. We also introduced intersectionality, or the notion that our identities consist of multiple features that combine in meaningful ways to create intersecting forms of privilege and oppression—and sometimes in seemingly contradictory ways that defy stereotypes. A Hispanic woman is likely to experience a combination of racism and sexism, but significant wealth may give her access to resources—and thus experiences—others with a similar background do not share. Reducing an audience to one demographic quality and making subsequent assumptions about them is overly simplistic.

Overly relying on demographic factors can also invite implicit biases, unreflective beliefs about a group of people based on your background, personal experiences, and social stereotypes. Don’t assume, for example, that a group of women is interested in hearing about makeup rather than sports. Not only does that assumption rely on a stereotype of women, but it is also likely informed by implicit biases about them.

When you rely on stereotypes or implicit biases to analyze your audience, you risk drawing faulty conclusions, harming your relationship with the audience, passing along misinformation about them, and hurting your speaking effectiveness. These concerns are especially true for your implied and implicated audiences, who may not be present to correct or add to your representation of them and their interests.

Additionally, demographics generally encourage you to concentrate on the majority views of your direct or target audience. This means you risk overlooking or marginalizing audience members who are exceptions to the predominant factors found in the audience. You might occasionally decide to not target audience outliers, but it is often beneficial to include appeals that might connect with those in the audience beyond the demographic norm. Similarly, the ability to account for audience demographics is complicated when the audience is dispersed. One example is a videorecorded speech uploaded to YouTube, which will remain accessible to future, unknown audiences. In such a case, with changing contexts, circumstances, and listeners, our ability to analyze our audience effectively is necessarily limited.

Psychological Factors

Like audience demographics, speakers should consider how psychological factors may influence reception of their message. Psychological factors are an audience’s predispositions related to their mental state, attitude, personal stakes, and interest in and experience with the topic, occasion, and speaker. Many of these predispositions relate to demographics. If we think in terms of standpoint theory, we know that an audience’s social identities (demographic factors) influence their experiences and thus their knowledge and views about the world (psychological factors).

Psychological factors such as audience interest in the topic and personal stakes can influence how an audience reacts to a message. For example, we generally assume audience members who attend voluntarily have more genuine interest in a topic. In contrast, when you address a largely captive audience—an audience that is required to be in attendance (such as your classmates)—it becomes more important to engage them and make the presentation relevant.

An audience’s interest level is related to their personal stakes—each individual’s financial, material, and/or psychological investments that could be improved or worsened based on how a topic is addressed. People who attend a speech voluntarily likely come with a sense of their own personal stakes. That is, they probably already perceive themselves as part of the implicated audience. Speakers can tailor their speeches accordingly. A captive audience, however, may not automatically perceive the speech as meaningfully affecting their lives and be more inclined to disengage as a result. Consequently, you might explicitly identify how your topic and its outcome affect them personally. Explain how they are an implicated audience.

Another psychological factor subject to audience analysis is the audience’s familiarity with the speaker and topic. Familiarity is the degree to which an audience already knows or is ignorant about the speaker and topic. Positive familiarity can be a source of goodwill between a speaker and audience, which the speaker can capitalize on to build credibility. In contrast, if a speaker has developed a poor speaking reputation or is unfamiliar to the audience, they will need to work harder to build a positive relationship. Relatedly, speakers may need to spend time giving extensive background information to audiences who are ignorant about a topic but can save that time when audiences are already knowledgeable.

Finally, it is important that the speaker consider the occasion or purpose of the speech when shaping it for a particular audience. This includes factors such as the expected formality of the event, its tone or mood, and its importance. As a speaker, you want your presentation to reflect the demands of the situation, and you should adapt accordingly.

Environmental Factors

As a speaker, you should also consider how environmental factors impact your message. Environmental factors refer to elements of the speaking situation such as time of day, size of audience, and communication medium. These factors can influence how the audience receives the message.

For instance, the time of day a speech is given—early, late, near mealtime—can affect the audience’s attitudes and reactions. Anyone who has taken an 8:00 a.m. class understands that audience alertness is often lower at that time of morning! Similarly, an audience’s size can influence their expectations. We typically anticipate speakers will talk more casually to a very small group and more formally to a large gathering. The communication medium impacts expectations as well.

We might think of the medium in terms of whether it is in person or presented through a screen (what we will call a “televisual delivery” in chapter 18). Even among televisual media, an audience’s expectations may differ. We may be content with slides during a live Zoom presentation but anticipate much more polished and highly edited visual aids in a YouTube video. In each case, you want to change your speaking plans due to such factors—how long you speak, the sorts of supporting media you use, your use of humor or seriousness, and so on.

To assist in doing so, try to learn as much as possible about your speaking environment. If speaking in person, visit the location in advance to stand in the speaking space, test equipment, and so forth. If speaking televisually, play around with the electronic platform you will use to better learn the opportunities and constraints it poses. Learn what expectations audiences may have for your specific communication medium. Being flexible and adjusting to the environmentally influenced needs of the audience will allow you to speak more effectively.