Exploring How to Define a Target Audience...

On Monday 28th November, we explored the way an audience is classified. Throughout media the audience has always been an essential feature, and the need to define your target audience had been driven by commercial prerogatives. For media an audience needs to be quantified, and for this to happen the audience needs to be measured, in order to measure the audience must be defined into various sub-groups.

There is a range of ways in which we could classifying the audience:
+ Age
+ Gender
+ Social class
+ stero-typical groups (example = emo's, chavs)
+ Culture
+ religion and ethnicity
+ their personality (example = people get a thrill from different things)

One of the most basic and common ways of classifying the audience is into Social Classes. There is a social scale of which people are classified by their occupation, the middle class are called "ABC1s" whilst as the working class are called "C2DEs" . People who are classified under "ABC1s" are said to vist the cinema more as they have a 'disposable income'. Whilst as "C2DEs" are said to have less of an income, therefore vist the cinema less which means they are more prone to see the mainstream films, that they know will entertain them. 66% of ABC1smake up all admissions.

Marketing people try to pinpoint the exact type of customer they expect from a film, which will make up their target audience. In order to this they create a 'character profile'. This profile describes their, personal lives, income, what they do and off course their film habits. There are eight different categorises which can be used to classify an audience by their values and beliefs; actualisers, fulfillers, achievers, experiencers, believers, strivers, makers and strugglers. We had the task of creating our own character profiles, I chose to create a profile for a Believer and Experiencer.

Audience profile - Believer
Cathy, a 45 year old mother of four. She reads the EDP every morning over her bran flakes, which are topped with raisins and semi-skimmed milk. Every month she treats herself to the Good Housekeeping magazine. She is a primary school teacher assistant at the local village school, in her free time she enjoys knitting and sewing. She attends church most Sundays, on Sunday afternoon she enjoys nothing better than a country walk through the fields that surrounds her cottage. Her husband, John who is 49 and very well mannered runs the small but successful peaceful village shop. As a family they attend the cinema to see mainstream films a few times a year; her and John enjoyed "The Kings Speech" however as a family they all enjoyed "Harry Potter". One the left is how I would envisage Cathy and John looking.

Audience profile - Experiencer
Laura is a 19 year old, first year university student who is studying fashion. She is naturally into the latest fashion, and is rubbish at saving money as she either spends it on clothes or her social life. She relays a lot on her parents for money. She buys closer magazine every Friday to read whilst she gets the train to her parents house which is an half an hour away in order to get her clothes washed! She goes to the cinema a few times each couple of months as she has a student budget (and she would rather spend money on clothes or drink), however she does enjoy watching mainstream romantic comedy's with her group of girls. On the left is how I would envisage Laura looking.