Market research and our audience

Audience and Market research

As part of our media research, we must produce some form of market research to discover the audience of our genre; horror.

What is market research?

Market research is a planned attempt to gain information, opinions and views a current product, market or to develop an image of the consumer for a product, with additional point to gather feedback or ideas from the audience of a product. Companies or Individual often interpret their research about an individual consumer or organisation or product through numerical, statistical and analytical methods to discover their particular interest.
Some things which can be considered in market research are market trends, customer analysis, choice modelling, competitor analysis, risk analysis, product research, and advertisement.

Why do we need to apply it to our film?

Film production and distribution integrate various methods of market research and targeting audiences. Some companies which work the UK are the “All Industry film Industry”, “The British Academy of Film & Television Arts”, “The British Film Institute”, “The British Video Association”, “The Cinema Advertising Association”, “The Cinema Exhibitors' Association”,” The Film Distributors' Association” and the “The UK Film Council”.
Audience

When we are planning our film, it was important to consider the audience. If our product didn’t have an audience, it would be useless to continue. Our research is crucial, questionnaires, comparisons with existing products and focus groups are the are all used to target the audience. Producers want to discover their focus groups, which are basically clarified by;
• income bracket/status
• age
• gender
• race
• location

As horror films are an established genre, they clearly already had an audience. As a result my initial step was to research online for the demographic of horror films, I found two tables from http://www.valmorgan.com.au/au/audiences/profiles/horror-movies/



Chart One

The first chart demonstrates the ages of the horror movie audience. It demonstrates that although the 50+ age group makes up most of the general population, they only make up 3 percent of the horror genre audience, while the 35-49 age group also make a big 27 percent of the general population however make a miniscule 6 percent of the horror film audience. The graph does demonstrate however that the horror film drama is hugely popular with the under 25 age group with them making up a 72 percent share of the audience. Although it is a restrictive audience as it only makes up 19 percent of the total general population, which is further restricted through restriction of film through certification. By conclusion, the horror film genre is is very popular with the under 25 age group, particularly the 18-24 age group.

Chart Two

The second genre demonstrates the gender demographic of horror film. It demonstrates that a massive 61 percent of males make up the horror movie audience compared to only 39 percent of females. In conclusion, the male under 25 demographic are our main target audience and our focus group.


How can we conduct our own research?

Interviews

The primary purpose of interviewing is gain personal and precise information from the person we interview. It is a form of surveying, asking a set sequence of questions for every person to be interviewed. Although we would be interviewing individuals, the aim is to produce an overall picture of a group of people and their interests or personal judgments.

As part of the interviewing process I produced this series of questions;
1. What is your age?
2. What is Your Gender?
3. Do you have an interest in horror films?
4. If so or If not, Why?
5. What specific type of horror films do you like? (Psychological Horror, slasher, supernatural, science fiction, fantasy, other)
6. What particular elements of horror films can you find inappropriate? (Graphic violence etcetera)
7. What conventional parts of the horror do you expect?
8. Does casting influence what film you watch?
9. What is your favorite Horror film?
10. What is your least favorite horror film?
11. Would certification influence what films you watch?
12. Where do you watch horror films?
13. What is the main reason you watch horror films?
14. Is horror you favorite genre?
15. In a film opening, what keeps you interested in the narrative?
16. What do you find most frightening in a horror film? (music, special effects etcetera)
17. What do you like to see in a horror film?
18. What do you dislike seeing in a horror film?
19. Would you prefer explained horror, or psychological horror?
20. What do you expect in a horror film?
Results
We interviewed 15 people, and I constructed several tables of our results;
1) Age
Age 16-21 22-27 28-33 34-39 40-45 46-51 52+
Number of people 8 1 1 1 2 2 0

2) Gender
Gender Male Female
Number 5 10
3) Do you have an interest in horror films?
Yes Non
Number 10 5
4) If so or If not, Why?

Why do you like? Scary Interesting suspense thrilling escapism exciting dramatic
Numbers 10 1 2 2 0 0 0

Nobody answered that they disliked horror films.
5) What specific type of horror films do you like?
What specific type of horror films do you like? Psychological Slasher Supernatural Science fiction Fantasy thriller gothic Other
3 4 2 1 0 5 0 0


6) What particular elements of horror films can you find inappropriate? (Graphic violence etcetera)
What is inappropriate? Gore Sexual themes Graphic violence Nothing
1 3 1 10

7) What conventional parts of the horror do you expect?

Conventions Murder Creatures Criminals Blood Violence Fear Eerie Settings Gore Darkness
4 2 1 2 2 1 1 1 1
8) Does casting influence what film you watch?
Casting Yes No
6 9
9) What is your favorite Horror film?
Film Alien The Exorcist Halloween Friday 13th Psycho The Texas chainsaw massacre Final Destination The Hills have eyes Dawn of the Dead
2 2 3 1 1 2 2 1 1
10)



Fieldwork

Fieldwork consists of face-to-face fieldwork and telephone interviews. Our main form of fieldwork was the facet-to-face interview due to the practicality of doing on location with numerous people, and some people may find telephone interviews patronizing or pointless, moreover there is no visual interaction between us and the person receiving the interview.

Interviewing in public places

We conducted all of our interviews in a public places, apart from a few private interviews. This was much easier than private interviews, as we could conduct these interviews in college where one of our focus groups is most prominent.
However, the main issue with this was we were only receiving limited feedback as on college grounds a majority of individual are aged 16-20, which removes the variety and broad spectrum of people who can give us wider feedback.
Moreover, there is a distinct gender gap with he people we interviewed, a majority were female which meant we were not catering for our under 25, male audience which we meant to target.
Overall, I don’t believe we captured a broad spectrum of genders and ages for our audience research, in future project, we need a much bigger sample of people, preferably targeting out intended audience.
How did we prepare for the interviews?

Workspace

We conducted all our interviews in the classroom, apart from a few others conducted at home. It was important to interview people as individuals, as their opinions, views or decisions could be influenced by others if interviews were conducted together, which would have altered our interview. It was also difficult for people to spend time doing our survey as people in the classroom inevitably had work to do, rushing the survey and may have affected certain results.

Interviewers' preparation

Before we interviewed, we firstly had to indentify a rough focus group to interview, which was our age group, meaning that interviewing class member would be the focus group of our interview.

1. Planning the questionnaire

What did we need to do?
Although it was tempting to produce a questionarrie quickly and with little consideration it was important that we gathered a more clear, targeted questionnaire. I achieved this by firstly research the demographic of horror film (seen above) with additional research into other interviews regarding horror movie audiences. It was important as we could possible exclude crucial questions which should have been in our interview, also we could have interviewed a completely incorrect audience, meaning our results would have missed our target audience completely. Moreover, it was important to make sure our questions were not biased and that people gave accurate results, which is something that in the drafting process recognized that some of the questions did have a bias, which would have distorted our results.

How did we set up our questionnaire?
We had various choices to make, whether we wanted to do spoken or written interviews. Both have benefits, written surveys for example have a smaller sense of urgency meaning people will take longer when answering the questions and possibly resulting in more genuine marks, whereas spoken surveys have a large sense of urgency and tend to be rushed, producing inaccurate results.
How long would we make our questionnaire?
As we had reasonably small sample, it wasn’t necessary to make the survey particularly long, moreover most people didn’t have the time for a extended lengthy interview, so a small set of questions lasting around 5-10 minutes was chosen in favour.

Results and trends
Contrary to our researched graphs, all the females interviewed watched horror films and had an interest in them; however none of the males claimed to have an interest in the genre. Most people enjoyed the thriller genre the most, with almost equally large group enjoying the slasher sub-genre.
Various conventions were mentioned on a broad spectrum, only five felt that there was inappropriate themes in horror films and most of those who specified inappropriate content were 22+ females.