Question Three. What have you learnt from audience research?

Audience research is defined as communication research that is conducted on specific to demographic. Audience Research was a vital tool in understanding the needs of our target demographic. Throughout the process of creating the production package we asked our target demographic for feedback in on whether out product meets the needs of our chosen audience. This is important because we are creating a commercial promotional package so as an institution we must supply prospective consumers with their demands in order to make money. Our Primary target demographic is 16-24 year old females with males age 17-32 being the secondary audience. Audience research gave us the ability to know whether we were track with our design and ideas. When the target audience responding positively to our work showed us we were on the right path. Negative audience research showed us that we needed to do more research in this area and reconsider our ideas, as at the end of the day it’s all about pleasing our target audience and catering to their needs. Our target audience are digital natives which meant we could contact them through social networking sites and use websites such as SurveyMonkey to collect data. Due to this our target audience is more likely to have more of an interest in the artists website than digital immigrants would.

Creating a questionnaire and distributing it via Survey Monkey, was the first piece of audience feedback the group conducted. This helped us discover what types of things our target audience found essential in a production package and also what they would like to see. Being a niche audience many responded that they would like to see a message from the artists to make the product more personal. We decided to follow through with this idea and placed a message from the artist on the digipak as well as the home page of the website. This allowed the audience to feel a more intimate connection with the artist. Our artists is a small upcoming artist for a niche audience, making the information and they way he responds to fans very personal and unique. This allowed fans to feel a bond with him. The alternative genre audience demand a unique visual style from there artists, this allowed us to be creative with the design of our product. The survey results also showed the fans had little care for the music video and were more interested in the actual quality of music. This is a recurring theme in the alternative genre, where the sound is more important than how an artist looks or how outgoing the music video is. ¼ of the people who answered our survey also said they don’t look at artists websites, again showing little interest in any of the products other than the songs themselves. Even though our target audience don’t take a huge interest in our production package we still wish for it to look professional and unique, so it represents Doug Miller in the correct way and attracts the secondary audience. The results also symbolized the importance of a track list, this influenced our design of the digipak. Making sure the track list was easy to read and visible from the outside.

Our second piece of audience feedback involved Samara and I playing our chosen song to a sample of our target audience and asking what this made them feel and think about. This allowed us to generate ideas for the music video and understand the general direction and feel the music video should contain. Many of the participants said the song made them feel relaxed this is usually linked to a slow pace video, so we deiced to have the video pace and speed of events slow and calming to fit with the mood of the song. They also said the song made them feel sad, we used this in our story plot of the music video, With the music video containing a darkened story containing death. The group decided that the music video should contain iconography that the audience can relate to.

We went on to do a focus group to see the audiences relationship with music videos, digipaks and websites of similar artists to see what stands out for them and what they respond to positively and negatively. This research showed the importance of visual art as all the participants responded really highly to this. We used this information throughout our promotion package resulting in us having the inside of the digipak completely hand painted, giving it a unique look which stands out to the audience. They responded negatively to long introductions in the music video saying it made them loose focus and interest, we made sure that we wouldn’t have a similar issue with our own video. So our video contains short cuts, constantly changing scenes and time patterns, to keep audience interested. The participants also rated countryside shots and scenes highly as this gives them something to relate to and symbolises being relaxed and freedom. As you can see our production package contains a large range of countryside shots.

Audience feedback was also taken into consideration when deciding which font to use for the artists logo, this was done by the group picking a range of fonts they found suitable, then asking target audience members to pick the one they liked the most. The target audience agreed with our highest preference front. Which motivated the group, due to it displaying we were on track with our design ideas. We did similar audience feedback on our choice of colour schemes, however as they couldn’t see this with our product, as a whole, they couldn’t accurately pick which scheme would fit the products best.

The digipak front cover came under a lot of scrutiny from audience feedback. The first design incorporated the logo design and different pictures of the countryside. The audience also responded negatively to the cover of the digipak, which was a little disheartening due to the fact I had spent so long on it. But they did make a valid point that the colours of the cover didn’t correlate well with the hand painted picture Claire had drawn. This lead to me redesigning it. Looking at similar artists for ideas and taking into consideration the autumn leaves colour scheme, when the audience reviewed this design. They said it lacked impact due to the light autumn colours and there being no point of focus. This lead me to do a more simplistic design, with the dear logo using the strong autumn colours as a point of focus. The target demographic mentioned the colours should be arranged from behind a part of the image, to make it suit the audience better. This gave it more of a focus point and lead to the audience rating it highly when we conducted reviews. By gaining qualitative feedback on the front cover I was able to create a product which fitted well with designs in the rest of the promotion package. However If I had done a large amount of target audience research into what type of design they would of liked to of seen on the front cover of the digipak, there would have been a higher chance I wouldn’t need to of done three different designs.

The audience feedback on the first draft of the digipak and website was the most vital of feedback we received. Our participants responded negative to lyrics being available on the website saying “A fan would go look it up if they really wanted to know.” This resulted in the removing of the lyrics being available on the homepage. Items such as the pop-up couldn’t receive a large amount of feedback due to it only being fully made on the last day, however I wished we had collected more feedback on this area as it appeared unrealistic in a professional product. Overall the audience research feedback taught us what the target audience found vital and unimportant such as the lyrics and the feedback worked well as a guideline to see out construction was on the right tracks.

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