Target Audience Research

At first I conducted a random survey to find out who consumed the most thrillers on average, per month. I asked thirty-two people from the age of sixteen to fifty-one plus. I did not ask anyone below the age of sixteen as most thrillers are rated at the age of sixteen or higher which means that people below that age cannot purchase or watch the films.

Out of the thirty-two people I conducted the survey with it was the sixteen to twenty-five year olds who consumed the most thrillers at one to three thrillers a month and some who consumed six plus films a month. Due to the fact that it was this age group that consumed the most films, I decided then to do a focus group on this age group. I also decided that my target audience would be the people who watched the most thrillers, sixteen to twenty-five year olds.

The first question I asked was "Which genre of thriller do you like the most?". Forty percent of the sixteen people I interviewed said their favorite genre of thriller was action/adventure. This was closely followed by the genre, sci-fi, voted by twenty-five percent of the people interviewed. From this I have decided to do an action/adventure thriller as that is what my target audience enjoy the most. Here I have made a pie chart to demonstrate my findings.

The next question I asked was "Have you seen any of these films?", here I was referring to the films that I had analysed in my research. I wanted to incorporate the conventions that the target audience liked from those films into my own. I found that thirty-eight percent of the people I interviewed had seen Psycho, closely followed by the thirty-one percent of people who had seen Se7en. I think that most people had seen Psycho as it is a timeless classic that has been spread through the generations from the first people to see it to the people who are only discovering it now and who will ultimately also pass it down through the future generations. I also think that a lot of people have seen Se7en because it is a modern film that people of this age group would go to see in large groups of them and their friends. Here is another pie chart to show my results.

After asking the previous question I then asked "What did you like about them?" I generalised their answers into four categories; sound, plot line, visual effects and feelings (how the film made them feel. fifty-three percent of the people I interviewed said that they liked the films because of the interesting plot line. Following this twenty-seven percent of the people I interviewed said they like it because of the music (sound) and how it made them feel scared. From this I have found that to make my thriller entertaining for the audience I must have a good plot line which they would find interesting and the soundtrack must be good enough that it would help me into building up tension in the thriller so as to make them feel scared. Here is a pie chart to show my results.

In conclusion I have decided that I will aim my thriller at people aged sixteen to twenty-five as they are the people who are most likely to watch it, it will be a action/adventure thriller as that is the favorite genre chosen by the age group and I will make sure that the thriller has a good plot line and has a good soundtrack as that was what was enjoyed most in the thrillers I asked about by the target audience.

Internet Target Audience research:

For my internet research on my target audience I found a website containing some graphs with appropriate figures on the the population of the country compared to how many watched thrillers.

This graphs shows that combined the under twenty-five year olds hold nineteen percent of the overall population and they consume the most thrillers at thirty-nine percent of all the thrillers. This backs up my own research when I did my own questionnaire and also found that the nearly all the under twenty-five year olds I interviewed watched at least one-three films a month. This also backs up my reason for choosing this group as my target audience.

This is a pie chart that shows the ratio of men to women who watch thrillers. From this I can see that from the total audience of those who watch thrillers in the general population fifty-seven percent are women. This tells me that my target audience should be swayed to a female target audience. However, looking at these figures I have decided to keep it a general target audience as the percentages are almost equal.

This information was taken from:

http://www.scribd.com/doc/22176569/Target-Audience-and-Genre-Research