To create a market successful product you need to look at existing and similar media projects, and take inspiration from the way they target their audiences. Through the use of demographics created for this particular task, such as the BARB classification of social grades and Maslow's Hierarchy of needs, I have decided to target my audience against these profiling structures, as this what real media professionals do. I will also conduct primary research which is particularly relevant to my own productions, also meaning that I represent the needs of my target audience directly.
To find out my target audience and what genres and styles of films are the most popular to increase the success of my film, I have created an online questionnaire on a website called ‘Survey Monkey’. Using this website, I can create a user-friendly questionnaire which can easily display the results that I receive in an interesting format, such as diagrams and charts.
This is important for my film to be a success, because I need to know that my film is appealing to the right audience for it to be a success. I have already made assumptions about the social grades of my target audience and where my possible viewers could fit into ‘Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs’ (as pictured below).
With this in mind, I feel that the people that would be more prone to watch my film would be ‘innovators’, ‘self-actualizers’ and ‘disconnected’. The reasons why I think this is because my film is going to be something different to most films, and innovators seek new and different things. It is focused on relationships and will be very creative, therefore fitting in with the self-actualizing audience. Finally, I feel my film would fit in well with the disconnected, because I think it would appeal to people who live in the ‘ever present now’ as it is a very modern film.
BARB, Broadcasters’ Audience Research Board, is the organization responsible for the official measurement of UK television audiences. While doing surveys, they measure a household status using a social class system:
A classification of household social status based on the occupation of the chief income earner. BARB reports the following social grades:
AB - higher (A) or intermediate (B) managerial, administrative or professional
C1 - supervisory or clerical and junior managerial, administrative or professional
C2 - skilled manual workers
D - semi-skilled and unskilled workers
E - state pensioners, casual or lowest grade workers
With this in mind, I feel that my film would appeal more towards C2 upwards, because I feel as I am creating a short film, it would generally be shown in art houses and small cinemas and the lower social grades would not generally go to see it, or be aware of its existence. However, I am not ruling out that D and E social grades wont see it; I am just predicting that higher social would probably be more likely to see it, while the lower grades might go and see a Hollywood Blockbuster. I don’t think any AB’s would see my film as having such high jobs might mean they are literally too busy to watch it and show no interest, regardless of if it being five minutes long.
Excellent research into target audience theory.
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