Regional Identity: Audience Profling

Introduction:

Understanding your audience is integral in the pre-production of a documentary, as having the audiences viewing tendencies in mind helps a filmmaker better tailor their product to be more appealing for the given target audience. Different segmentations have different interests, meaning that subject matter and media format preferences differ between age groups. It is important that your product is advertised to the correct demographic, to maximise its potential in making revenue. This means you are more likely to make back the budget thus satisfying the financial expectations of the client.

What does the brief say about the audience?

As stated by the brief, our audience is "young people from the ages of 16-25".  This is useful information going forward. With this in mind, I will research the viewing tendencies and interests of people aged 16 to 25. I can also infer from the brief that my audience are people who live in the North East of England. This helps me further segment my target demographic as I now understand the factors of geographic location and age. This will help me construct a audience profile, which is useful to have going in to production as so that you can tailor your product to be enticing to your desired audience.

What is audience profiling?

Audience profiling is the process of getting customers' data and segmenting them into groups with similar behaviors. The objective is to know your audience better to create personalised campaigns and increase results.

What is a demographic?

Your audience demographic refers to factors such as gender, age, occupation, geographical location, income, and marital status. If there isn’t an audience for a media text then it won’t be successful either in getting its message across or, if it is a commercial media text, making money for the producers.

Media producers use audience research and analysis to find out as much as possible about their target audience and use that research to ensure their production will appeal to them.

Demographic segmentation is the process of identifying social trends within a group which exists within a community. Examples of which include: sex, gender, ethnicity, level of education or the level of qualification that one has, martial status, the nature of one's employment, age, religion. 

All of these examples are sub-communities in themselves that often have trends in interests or reception of media. Applying this to developing a target audience: using demographic segmentation is advantageous as it aids in narrowing down the needs of the audience consuming a product - ergo making the product appealing to the target audience We can achieve this through using psychographics. Psychographics are similar to demographics in that they give specific focus to a segmented group within society. However the distinction, between the two, is that while the demographics are used to identify trends; psychographics are used to analyse social trends within a given group. In Layman's terms: demographics are the who - psychographics are the why. 

What is the demographic for my documentary?

What is a psychographic?

Psychographics are therefore important and refers to psychological factors such as your audience's personality traits, interests, hobbies, and values. A Psychometric Audience Profile defines an audience by how they think and by considering their values, attitudes and lifestyle.

A psychometric method of categorisation specific to advertising was developed by Young and Rubicam, a marketing and communications company.

Demographic factors:

Occupations and Income Brackets - One common way of classifying the audience is to look at their income. For example, in the UK, the NRS social grades divide the population according to occupations and salaries. Although the grades are fairly basic target group indicators, they remain the standard for lots of market research for organisations and institutions.

• Motives, as defined in media terminology, is an internal force that stimulates someone to behave in a particular manner. A person has media consumption motives and buying motives. A motive for watching television may be to escape; a motive for choosing to watch a situation comedy rather than a police drama may be the audience member’s need to laugh rather than feel suspense and anxiety.
• Attitudes – a learned predisposition, a feeling held toward an object, person, or idea that leads to a particular behavior. Attitudes are enduring; they are positive or negative, affecting likes and dislikes. A strong positive attitude can make someone very loyal to a brand (one person is committed to the Mazda brand so they will only consider Mazda models when it is time to buy a new car). A strong negative attitude can turn an audience member away from a message or product (someone disagrees with the political slant of Fox News and decides to watch MSNBC instead).
• Personalities – a collection of traits that make a person distinctive. Personalities influence how people look at the world, how they perceive and interpret what is happening around them, how they respond intellectually and emotionally, and how they form opinions and attitudes.
• Lifestyles – these factors form the mainstay of psychographic research. Lifestyle research studies the way people allocate time, energy and money.
• Motives – an internal force that stimulates someone to behave in a particular manner. A person has media consumption motives and buying motives. A motive for watching television may be to escape; a motive for choosing to watch a situation comedy rather than a police drama may be the audience member’s need to laugh rather than feel suspense and anxiety.
• Attitudes – a learned predisposition, a feeling held toward an object, person, or idea that leads to a particular behaviour. Attitudes are enduring; they are positive or negative, affecting likes and dislikes. A strong positive attitude can make someone very loyal to a brand (one person is committed to the Mazda brand so they will only consider Mazda models when it is time to buy a new car). A strong negative attitude can turn an audience member away from a message or product (someone disagrees with the political slant of Fox News and decides to watch MSNBC instead).
• Personalities – a collection of traits that make a person distinctive. Personalities influence how people look at the world, how they perceive and interpret what is happening around them, how they respond intellectually and emotionally, and how they form opinions and attitudes.
• Lifestyles – these factors form the mainstay of psychographic research. Lifestyle research studies the way people allocate time, energy and money.

North East Audience Profile:

Now that I have researched what makes an audience profile, I will construct an audience profile on a prospective audience member based on the information I have collected.

Gender 

The North East has a very even distribution of gender, with 50.8% being women and 49.2% being women. The brief does not state any inclination to appeal to any one gender, meaning I will not try to orient my product to either.

Ethnicity -

I will not orient my documentary towards any particular ethnicity. Class transcends ethnicity, thus the working class contains many different ethnicities. 

Age:

the average age in the North East is 41.6.

Audience Psychographic:

I believe the audience psychographic my prospective audience most fits in to is 'The Explorer Model'. Explorers are described as people who like to discover new things and are attracted to new and innovative brands. Many more people who are Gen Z are classes as explorers, due to their relative interest in technologies fulfilling the principle of being interested in new and innovative products. With my target audience being people aged between 16 and 25 many of them will be students, thus making the primary theme of my documentary, education, a relatable topic for this audience. 

Explorers are also interested in learning and watch more non-fiction than fiction. I believe this appeal of education would make my documentary attractive in the eyes of a viewer.

Social Grade:

I would say the majority of people in the North East of England operate at D social grade or an E social grade. The North East is well known for being working class, as well as having a notable reliance on social welfare, thus it also fits in to the E grade.