The Consumer

CONSUMERISM

Consumerism is an economic theory based around people buying things they don't necessarily need, such as decorations and overpriced tables with elaborate designs. 
To find your target consumer, you have to look at the type of people that you think will be buying your work or who your primary consumer will be.
https://www.mtholyoke.edu/~kelle20m/classweb/wp/page2.html

The key things you need to know about your target consumer are;

-The type of class your consumer will be, this will help you price your work so that it is affordable for them. 
- Where they live, this could help a number of things such as you can reference locations and tourist attractions within your work which would make them want to buy it for sentimental value. 
- Who your consumers are, this would help know the type of artwork they buy which you can cater to in your own way.

There are three main types of markets for consumerism; the consumer market, the industrial market and the reseller market. 

A consumer market is the people that buy products based on their wants or needs. 
An industrial market is usually a company that buys your product to help produce their own such as machinery or materials. 
A reseller market is retailers and shops who buy your product to resell it to the public to make a profit. 

My main focus will be the consumer market as I will be selling prints or artwork directly to them. Freelance artists generally focus on the consumer market and the reseller market, there are companies online such as RedBubble, Society6 and Etsy. 
There are a lot of different websites that you can sell your work from online, however they do generally take a large commission from it. 

To find out my target consumer, I've looked at what my work has to offer which would be mainly decoration. Therefore I need to find the type of consumer that mainly buys artwork for decoration, this is generally artistic people that have an interest in art or have art be part of their life somehow, such as art teachers, art based students, illustrators, graphic designers etc. It's important that I don't try to cater to as many consumers as I can because then the work wont be as interesting to any one group of consumers. 
http://edwardlowe.org/digital-library/how-to-identify-a-target-market-and-prepare-a-customer-profile/

Based on this information I think that my target consumer would be younger possibly upper class artists and illustrators such as other university students, that live in a similar location to me.