Audience Research

How ‘Slumdog Millionaire’ engages their audience through marketing techniques:


Through the use of viral marketing, as this increases awareness of the film through, word of mouth, or via the internet, e-mail or social networking sites. This is mainly meant to achieve high product sales as marketing itself can be just as expensive as producing the film. Pathé focused on online marketing, which then produced technological convergence. Particularly search marketing, as niche audiences were targeted. They successfully drove online traffic to their marketing websites, Pathé worked with ‘tug’ to create online awareness through; Google, they had banners across the website, trailer ads and many other advertising techniques online. The film beat all UK box office records.


 

Uses and gratification theory

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Mind Map exploring how our target audience may use the media. Using these ideas, we can decide how we want to advertise our film through the use of media. To build on these ideas, we will create questionnaire and videos asking our audience 'how they consume media'.

Audience

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i think questionnaires are the best way to gain audience research, because its easy and cheap to make. You can write them in as much depth as you need, and can improve its accuracy by asking a larger amount of people.






1. Gender: female male





2. Age: under 15 16-20 20-25 25-30 30+





3. Race: (if no objection?)





4. Where do you live?





5. Do you like Documentaries?





6. Which of the following topics would interest you most:



Nature

History

Real life

Health

Family

Celebrities

Food

Culture

Religion

None of the above







7. What persuades you to go to watch a documentary?





8. Do you watch documentaries for entertainment, knowledge, or both?





9. Which one is of most importance in a documentary:

Soundtrack

Presenter

Script/dialogue

Realism

Cinematography

Topic





10. What is your favourite ending:



Cliff hanger

Sad conclusion

Happy conclusion





Candidate 1:1. female

2. 16-20

3. White British

4. London

5. yes

6. Health

7. Trailers

8. Both

9. Presenter

10. Happy conclusion



Candidate 2:1. male

2. 20-25

3. Italian

4. Brighton

5.yes

6. History

7. Reviews in magazines and adverts

8. Knowledge

9. Topic

10. Happy conclusion



Candidate 3:1. Male

2. 30+

3. Asian

4. Oxfordshire

5. yes

6. Real life

7. Peer pressure

8. Both

9. Topic and Realism

10. Cliff hanger



We found the questionnaire very useful we asked about 20 people of varying ages but I only decided to show these because are within my target audience and their answers seemed most useful. The first 4 questions are just general to work out if they are my target audience or not.



The 5th question shows if I should continue quizzing them or not because obviously if they don’t watch documentaries they wont be able to answer the following questions to any degree of usefulness. The next 5 questions are the ones we studied and took into account when creating our documentary. They were useful in telling us what it should contain and what it shouldn’t. like it should be entertaining as well as educational and most people don’t like sad conclusions.



I looked at the website www.findyourtribe.co.uk, where I answered questions relating to our target audience. This could give us further incite into what interests our target audience



My Target Audience
In marketing and advertising, a target audience, is the primary group of people that something, is aimed at. A target audience can be people of a certain age group, gender, status etc. Target Audiences focus on different groups for example Adults, teens and children. Target markets differ in size, assortment, geographic scale, locality, types of communities, and in the different types of merchandise sold. My Chosen Target Audience is young people aged between 16-25 because this age range is most profitable. Other groups, although not the main focus, may also be interested. Although the 16-25 audience isn’t the richest, out of all the different age groups they usually spend the most money on films. Because they don’t have so many bills or family things etc to spend it on.
My chosen audience consumes media mostly through Magazines, TV, Cinema, Youtube and Internet. so the best way to distribute my product is through these media forms to enable my target audience to view my film easily and utilising technology.

Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs


An interpretation of Maslow's hierarchy of needs, is represented as a pyramid with the less important needs at the top. Maslow's hierarchy of needs is a theory in psychology, by Abraham Maslow in his 1943.
Maslow studied what he called exemplary people such as Albert Einstein, Jane Addams, Eleanor Roosevelt, and Frederick Douglass rather than mentally ill or neurotic people as he felt the person had to be well to give him correct results


Uses and Gratification theory

During the 1960s, as the first generation to grow up with television became grown ups, it became increasingly apparent to media theorists that audiences made choices about what they did when consuming texts. Far from being a passive mass, audiences were made up of individuals who actively consumed texts for different reasons and in different ways. In 1948 Lasswell suggested that media texts had the following functions for individuals and society:
-surveillance
-correlation

-entertainment
-cultural transmission
Researchers Blulmer and Katz expanded this theory and published their own in 1974, stating that individuals might choose and use a text for the following purposes (ie uses and gratifications):
-Diversion: escape from everyday problems and routine.

-Personal Relationships: using the media for emotional and other interaction, eg)
substituting soap operas for family life
-Personal Identity: finding yourself reflected in texts, learning behaviour and values from
texts
-Surveillance: Information which could be useful for living e.g.) weather reports, financial
news, holiday bargains
Socio-Economics

socio-economics refers broadly to the "use of economics in the study of society." More narrowly, contemporary practice considers behavioural interactions of individuals and groups through social capital and social "markets" and the formation of social norms. In the end, it studies the relation of economics to social values.


A Upper / Middle Class



B Middle Class


C1 Lower Middle Class


C2 Skilled Working Class


D Other Working Class


E Lowest Level of Subsistence


F1 Large Farmers (50+ acres)


F2 Small Farmers (50- acres)

My chosen target audience would be Lowest level of subsistence (E), because most of them would be in school or university, and wouldn’t have a full time job. The implications of this is that they would be very careful about spending money as they are on a tight budget, so this makes the advertisements and products “status” very important so they think its worth spending their money on.


The hypodermic syringe
There have been many theories formed over the years on how the media work on the mass audience. The simplest theory to understand is the hypodermic syringe. This has been very popular with many people who fear the effects of media on them and, or the population.
The theory is a syringe that injects ideas, attitudes and beliefs into the audience who is seen as a powerless mass with little choice but to be influenced. an example of this is you watch something violent, you may then do something violent, influenced by it.
Problem: not all people are easily influenced. some people might see violence on TV and think its awful and think they never want to do anything violent.

The Culmination Theory

This theory is that any one media text does not have too much effect although, over a long period of time watching violence would cause less sensitivity to violence. The same would occur with watching women being mistreated in soaps would then make you less concearned about it in real life, you would see it as normal because you became used to it over time.
Problem: if the person in question is strong minded enough in their veiws then seeing something wrong being done repetitively would if anything only strengthen their veiws on the matter. For example black rights - seeing blacks being discriminated against on tv or real life didnt weaken their views on the subject.
The two step flow

This is the idea that we will be likely to discuss our experience of the media  with others and if we respect and listen to their opinion, we will perhaps be more strongly affected by it. These people according to the theory are called opinion leaders.
This is a mind map of my target audience showing the colours, products, brands, celebrities and music that they like. I also surrounded my mind map with real products, such as ipod, nail varnish, make-up testers and perfumes.