3. What have learned from your audience research?

The sample group I chose was mainly C2/C1 category and are in higher education and planning to go onto study at degree level, which suggests they are aspirational and independent which links well the audience that I associate Blighters with. I found this out due to the audience research I did previously. I used the social networking site, www.facebook.com to find out what consumers thought of my music video productions and print productions.

However, I used it mainly as an aid, because I asked certain participants to answer the questionnaire and sent them the link to the questionnaire; I mainly asked consumers individually, because the participants I tagged in the questionnaire didn’t respond as quickly as I wanted. All of the participants in the focus group I asked were in the demographic 16-20 years. This was because I felt the appropriate demographic for our band’s genre was young people.

This graph shows the gender of the participants I asked; the majority being female. Although, the band members are all male and may create a sense of aspiration for the male consumers; I think that male consumers may appear threatened by an all male band which is why I believe that Blighters are aimed more towards female consumers. From Blighters myspace page, the majority of their friends are other bands or female fans, which strengthens the idea that females are more the target audience then male consumers. However, according to the graph below the majority of consumers asked liked the video for different reasons, and the two participants that disliked the genre, liked other aspects of the video. Although, this graph isn’t gender specific, I think we would have been able to see whether female or male consumers preferred this song, because the previous graph just states how many of each gender participated in the questionnaire. I have found that by using a strong narrative I was able to keep the focus groups attention because they enjoyed the strong “enjoyable” narrative. Many participants liked the mixture of the performance shots and narrative, because they felt it kept the pace up and made the video more exciting. The main reason I think the audience liked the narrative was because we’re so exposed to it on music channels; many videos have a strong narrative and many don’t have a mixture of performance shots, thus relying heavily on narrative, which is something that I felt made this video stand out more and gave the audience something fresh to watch.

The aspects of the music video that the two participants disliked was the genre, and it was a personal preference idea rather than a problem with the video itself; the participants didn’t like the genre of the music video, however this didn’t prevent them from enjoying the narrative and composition of the shots.

In terms of my print productions, the majority of participants said they would purchase the album because of the advert or album, as the terms “are strong” and they flow well together. The participants preferred the simplicity of the advert and album cover than they would’ve done if it was more colourful and busier (in terms of information). I learnt that by keeping my advert simple, I was able to appeal to a broader audience, because they weren’t overwhelmed by information or colours.