Audience Research and Survey Analysis

I am doing this piece of work so that I can clearly explain my target audience in detail, including their demographics, psychographics and social grade. I am hoping this will be able to give the client a better idea of who I am attempting to target through my work and why, detailing why I have made each choice and why it would be an effective choice to target those groups over others who may also work for this piece of work. 

In this post I will talk about my target audience and a survey I did at the beginning of this project to try and get a more detailed look at who my target audience is specifically. Getting their feedback was important before the pre-production stage as it meant that I could alter my original ideas to help look at what I could specifically include in my documentary in order to educate my target audience about my topic of choice.

By finding out more specific factors about my target audience such as specific demographics (age, gender) and some psychographics (their interests and what they spend their time doing) this has effectively helped my narrow down my idea to what I specifically want to do as the topics that the audience are already aware of will have appear less in my documentary than the issues my audience have claimed they know little/nothing about. 

We were initially given the age group of 16-25 however given the fact that I have chosen a more serious topic I feel like my documentary will appeal to the older side of that age range rather than the younger. I like that I will be making a product with an older age range in mind as my previous products were all aimed at an audience of teenagers rather than young adults.

Psychographics:

My target audience for this piece of work would most likely be a mix between mainstreamers and explorers as these two groups seem to be most likely to enjoy the product that I plan on making. I feel like my work would influence these two groups the most as I plan on focusing on the idea of the history of the city and the two groups mentioned above seem to be those who would be most intrigued by this. Explorers seek discovery, to learn. And my documentary plans to do just this, to help those who view it learn about the city they most likely grew up in/now live in. Mainstreamers however, I chose as they are the largest and most common group of people and I feel they would find my work more interesting than say strugglers as it is an educational piece of work focusing on the City of Sunderland and not on something like self identity. I feel my work would not appeal to those within the strugglers group or even the aspirers. I feel my work would not appeal to aspirers as they are people who are of the younger generation however they are more focused on status and this ideal doesn't align with my work in the slightest. The reason I feel strugglers would not find my work interesting/appealing would be because they are a group of people who feel like they do not fit in with the mainstreamers and they tend to seek something that gives them an escape which is something my work will not do for them, if anything my work would do the opposite as it would make them focus on what's real and all around them

Demographics:

Demographics are the things that define your audience down to a certain target using things such as age, gender, religion, class, sexual orientation, ethnic background, education, occupation, etc.

For this project the age range I will be focusing is those within the age range of sixteen and eighteen as this is the age range we were given in the brief to focus on. However, my work will most likely appeal to the older side of this age range as it is focusing on history and that is not something a lot of teenagers enjoy.

For Gender, religion, sexual orientation and ethnicity I would say there is absolutely no preferences for this as it doesn't matter what they identify as when it comes to this specific piece of work. This will most likely change once I get my results back from my survey however I am going into this work with the idea that there is nothing specific I am focusing on identity wise apart from age, class and occupation/education.

Even though I have no preference for those listed above , I would say occupation, education and class will be things where I do have a preference. For occupation I would say that I would not care if those in my audience have a job however it would have to be someone in a low/mid skilled occupation or an entry level position as my audience is supposed to be focused on those within education. Although, I suppose it doesn't matter as long as they are within the age range. For education I would say I would prefer that the audience member would be in college/university as students fit better into my idea/demographics than those who aren't in education. Class is something I have a preference in however I will discuss that in social grade.

Social Grade

My main target when it comes to social grade for this project would be those within the 'E' band. The reason for this is because the majority of people within this social grade are students. Some of my target audience may be within category D/C2 however the majority would be within E. 

NME Style Profiling.

The hobbies and Interests of those within my target audience are included in the audience profiling you can see above. The links to the articles I used to gather my information for this are linked below.

https://www.marketwatch.com/story/7-things-you-need-to-know-about-generation-z-2021-01-29

https://www.ypulse.com/article/2022/05/18/these-are-gen-zs-15-biggest-hobbies/

Mainstreamers are known to follow the latest trends as well as being one of the more popular groups of people so therefore they are part of my target audience. Those within my target audience may enjoy things such as sports, art, gaming and social media. As well as this they may enjoy reading, their phones, etc. Due to the target ages I was given this seems appropriate for those in my audience which is also why I have included a student lanyard. Those within my audience may be the kind to partake in different trends 

Survey Analysis

I asked the two questions you can see above so that I could get more information on the demographics of my audience (or more specifically the people who did my survey) as this meant that I could begin to narrow down my audience to a more specific audience as it gives me more information to work with when finalizing my ideas. Seeing as there were pretty much a split amount of males and females (45.5% female. 45.5% male and 9.1% otherwise.) in the class this means I can make the product with no gender preference in mind so I will not have to think about colour schemes that appeal to a woman over a man as well as content, etc. The age was also an important thing to ask for as not only does it apply to finding out the demographics but it also means that I know what age range my content must appeal to to make sure it is relevant and interesting.

These two questions above were asked purely so I could get some specific figures on the demographics of my audience seeing as I had mentioned above that I had preferences for what I wanted my audience to be. I had said earlier that I would definitely like if my target audience were in college level education or higher and as you can see above everyone who took my survey fits the ideals I wanted them to fit. The question about working was asked just so I could get some statistics on the different social grades of my audience and as I expected the majority of my audience fit into the 'E' social grade however 36.4% of my audience do not fit into this category and instead fit into D or even potentially C2.

I asked the question you can see above as it was important to know if those within my target audience actually knew who the client is. The majority of them knew who Sunderland Culture are however I had expected this as most of those who took my survey were those doing the same project as me however two of the eleven people who took my survey did not actually know who Sunderland Culture were. Either way I figured I will be including the logo of the organization in the pieces of work I produce.

I asked this question and the question below to basically find out more about the target audiences psychographics, as this question sort of reveals more about their personality/opinion to me as a creator. From this question I would figure that the majority of my audience would be Explorers possibly (As I had predicted above) as explorers are said to seek discovery and out of every category I feel that this one is the most suitable for what I was asking. Knowing this gives me more knowledge on what kind of person I am making my product for which means when it comes to narrowing down my ideas I have more to work with.

The question above was asked purely for me as a creator to find out what places in the city interest my audience as knowing this gives me more ideas for what to include within the visual aspects of my documentary as well as the print pieces I will be doing. Including what interests my audience gives me more of a chance to keep their attention than if it were something they completely did not care about. The answers I got were very helpful to me as some of the places that were given to me by my audience were places I already had written down in my initial ideas as places I wanted to film.

I asked this question as I was planning on taking footage of different places around Sunderland however I wasn't sure if I also wanted to take some footage of the people within Sunderland for my documentary. However, due to the overwhelming amount of people who feel that people are part of the culture, this has changed my plans and I have decided I will also take footage of people within the city to use as shots that will be behind my voiceover in the documentary.

Audience Profile.pptx from KatieLouiseMcCririck1