Target Audience.

Target audience is the group of people that the product will appeal to. A target audience is primarily defined by gender and age range. Additional elements can include socioeconomic status, rural or urban, race, family status, cinema goers or not, and specific interests. 

However, before you think you are certain about your chosen potential audience, there are a lot to consider. Know your audience – this saying has been heard so often that it’s almost become cliché. It is often the case that a number of people do not pay enough attention to their audiences’ needs and wants as they know the person’s sex or age for example, but that does not mean you really know your audience. Of course certain characteristics such as sex/age are crucial, but you have to find out more about your potential audience in order to achieve success and to fulfil their needs, otherwise knowing their age and gender will not mean anything unless you gain a far more adept knowledge into an audience member’s psyche. Therefore you need to find out more and the only solution to this is to hand out questionnaires.

With the group, a questionnaire was cautiously designed so we could settle on the potential audience. The films we gained inspiration from, such as ‘Reservoir Dogs’, ‘Public Enemies’, ‘Goodfellas’ and ‘The Godfather’, we noticed that the films were targeting solely/mainly on males above the age of 18, due to unsuitable scenes for adolescents. And that goes without saying that our media product would be targeting around that group too. Our film trailer is clearly going to be a Crime & Gangster which means the audience will be limited. We aim to use/portray the codes and conventions of a typical Crime & Gangster film in order to fulfil the target audience’s needs.

Therefore, to determine our audience, we made the questions specific and straightforward so we would be mindful as to how we will present their needs on screen in order to satisfyingly confirm their expectations. We had to bear in mind that females would also be interested in this genre so we had to make the questionnaire unbiased and reliable. We did this by handing out 20 questionnaires, 10 to boys and 10 to girls, making sure the age difference was not the same. This way, our result would not only be fair, but also dependable. Although we know the typical themes, codes and conventions of a Crime & Gangster film, it is vital to obtain information that will help make this a success.

Here is our questionnaire with carefully thought through questions: