12. Audience research

Target Audience:

A particular group at which a type of media is aimed.

Whilst researching, I listed down questions to take in consideration on how to define a target audience when creating a media for them:
- Where is your target audience located?
- Are they male, female or both?
- What is their average age?
- What are their common interests?
- What is their income range?
- What common values do they share?



It is always good and useful for a film to have a target audience and to invest time into understanding them. This helps plan advertising and saves money as you know who you are aiming your product at. This means you have to take in attitudes, behaviour, relationships, qualifications and professions into consideration. This could mean speaking to your audience or running surveys to find out more about what they like.

When thinking about audiences and what their preferences of genre may be, particular stereotypical ones come to mind. For example, the action genre typically appeals to the male gender who are above the age of 20. Their interests might involve cars and guns as these are a common genre tropes in action movies.

Teenagers typically prefer the high school comedy and animation genre, as found in my previous research. Older teenage (female) audiences usually go for these as there is can be aspects of romance in high school movies,  though there is a constant male gender (especially younger teenage males)  as there are a lot of funny moments and adventure in animations. 


In order to further my audience research, I created a survey using the site Survey Monkey where I asked people what their favourite genres were and why they liked that particular genre. The age gap for the participants who took this questionnaire were from 13 years to 60 years. Here are the results.

From my results I can see that comedy, horror and action are the 3 favourite genres of movies from the participants. Comedy is the most preferred genre as it has just over 25% of votes. This tells me that the majority of people enjoy watching something that can make them laugh. When asked why this is their favourite genre in the questionnaire, I had responses such as: "I like to laugh a lot" and "Because a movie isn't a movie without any top quality banter". The chart also shows me that not many people are a fan of western or thriller movies.

Overall it is clear that people prefer comedies, horrors and action films. However, what I should have also concluded was what their least favourite genre of film was so that I compare the results together.