RESEARCH: HOW BRANDS TARGET AUDIENCES

I need to plan how to reach my target audience. Therefore, I need to know who they are (factors that may be relevant include age, gender, ethnicity, social class), what their media needs are (so that I can produce a product that they will want) and how to reach them (to market my film). I will show how my research has shaped / influenced my planning. 

I started by investigating how brands target audiences in preparation for creating my own audience profile for my AS Foundation Production.  
As part of distributing my film, I will be devising marketing strategies, such as reaching out to my target audiences through a film website, Facebook page, Twitter page and P&A (a film poster). 
In addition to profiling my audience, I will work out why they enjoy the genre. Why would they want to watch my film? What makes my film different from competing films ? How will my film appeal to viewing needs of my target audience?

Who Is My Target Audience: Action Steps

1. Who is my primary target audience? For example: British, male and female 18-45+ who love thriller films, TV crime drama and psychological thrillers.

2. What makes my film stand out from the competition? For example:  Our film is about a war photographer who suffers from post-traumatic stress and kidnaps a child.

3. Why should my audience watch my film? For example:  Total Film / Empire / Cinema Scope / Slant / Sight and Sound says: Most powerful psychological thriller since Don't Look Now!

Time spent understanding my audience will help me create a profile of my ideal audience member. This information will then be useful when I create my marketing strategy.

Audiences can be segmented and defined by their GEARS
Gender
Ethnicity
Age
Region / nationality
Socio-economic group

My research demonstrated that all products (including mass media products such as print magazines) have clearly segmented and distinct audiences based on gender, age and socio-economic groups as these examples illustrate (source Bauer Media Advertising):

My target audience consumes mass media platforms such as radio, so I investigated the target audience for Kiss, which is an example of a large niche audience ('young, London, dance music'). I could make a radio trailer to promote my film and air it on Kiss:

In Maslowe's Hierarchy of Needs, audiences have different levels of needs, with higher level needs - such those driving as media consumption - motivating people only once lower level needs are met.

 

There are several models of audience behaviour, two of which construct audiences in contrasting ways (passive or active):
The Media Effects model or 'hypodermic syringe' model sees audiences as passively led, influenced and manipulated by all that they consume as gullible and impressionable.
The Uses and Gratifications model presents audience behaviour as active choices (uses) that are pursued to meet (gratify) a variety of needs. For Blumler and Katz, these four needs are for entertainment/ escapism/ distraction, seeking information (sometimes called surveillance), personal identity (to support our world view) and social relationships (bonding 'water cooler' moments with friends or family as well as on-screen relationships with favourite performers).

The two-step flow model of audience behaviour.
Paul Lazarsfeld, Bernard Berelson, and Hazel Gaudet analysed the voters' decision-making processes during a 1940 presidential election campaign and published their results in a paper called The People's Choice. Their findings suggested that the information does not flow directly from the text into the minds of its audience unmediated but is filtered through "opinion leaders" who then communicate it to their less active associates, over whom they have influence. The audience then mediate the information received directly from the media with the ideas and thoughts expressed by the opinion leaders, thus being influenced not by a direct process, but by a two step flow. This diminished the power of the media in the eyes of researchers, and caused them to conclude that social factors were also important in the way in which audiences interpreted texts. This is sometimes referred to as the limited effects paradigm. (Source: Mediaknowall.com)
 
Socio-economic bands

I looked at iTunes Movie Trailers to find out what audiences were currently offered: