ORGANISATION

I keep me organised and up to date on my blog and for the rest of the As course I decided to create a Trello with three columbus labelled to do, doing and done so that I can move the cards once I had completed and posted that piece of work. 

This one I made for the work for September and October. 

PLANNING:RISK ASSESSMENT

I have created a Pintrest of pictures of the locations we are going to use in our opening. I have anotated the pictures of each location with a risk assessment and the points that we need to take into consideration when shooting in this location. 

Click here to view my location Pinterest.

RESEARCH:TARGET AUDIENCE

Do brands profile their audience? 

All major bands do careful research into their target audience. For example I investigated how NME researched their target audience, using profiling about gender, age, social class, economic power,social media habits and trends. 

I have also studied the uses and gratifications model of audience behaviour (Blumer and Katz 1973) and I know that audiences consume media that meets their needs. We are making a film for a target age bracket of older teens and young adults, witch might also be watched by people of their parents age, in other words a mainstream audience that also enjoys films of the thriller genre. 

I also know from my own experience and that of my friends that I will often gravitate towards  films and television programmes that feature people of my own age that might be undergoing similar problems and life experiences. Therefore our film is likely to feature characters similar to our target audience. 

I also know from my study of distribution methods employed by real distributors, having researched their role from the FDA website www.launchingfilms.com that my target audience use social media to get information about their leisure activities, so I need to research what social media my target audience uses. 

When I have been at the cinema, such as my recent visits to see What We Did On My Holiday and The Hunger Games Catching Fire- Part One, I did notice that the in cinema trailers featured films that were likely to appeal to the target audience already sitting in front of them. In other words the target audience for these future films was already a captive audience right there. I noticed that the audience for What We Did On Our Holiday tended to be a family audience but mostly older people rather than teenagers. After all I was with my middle age parents. However the audience for The Hunger Games was predominantly people of my age, a bit younger and a bit older. 

How do brands profile their audiences?
I investigated a brand that young people definitely consume, Kiss radio. Brands such as Kiss use viewer profiling to distinguish who they are aiming their product. These brands tend to group society for example age groups, gender and hobbies. I turned to their website to learn about their mission statement:

KISS 100 continues to successfully hit the mark with its young London target audience, reaching more 15-34s than any radio station in London. Every week 1.9 million listeners tune in to the best dance music on offer in London. Rickie, Melvin and Charlie reach 1.5m listeners across the UK and 783,000 listeners in London each week 
KISS is an iconic youth brand, which began life as a pirate station driving the dance and urban revolution. KISS introduced DJ’s like Judge Jules, Danny Rampling, Roger Sanchez, Spoony and Trevor Nelson and never stopped providing that passion, innovation and desire to break new ground, ensuring all the best new artists and DJ’s play their music on KISS with over 40 hours of specialist programming.KISS showcases Drum & Bass, R&B, Hip Hop, Dance, Garage, Dubstep, Deep House and Nu Disco and are always on the next big sound.  Shortee Blitz and DJ MK, Majestic, DJ EZ, DJ Swerve, DJ Hype, Sinden, WideBoys and DJ Pioneer all represent their music on KISS FM UK and the KISS Fresh channel showcases even more of the hottest and newest tunes with DJs like Ray Fox, Tough Love, DEVoultion etc and the KISSTORY channel provides 24/7 old skool & anthems.

From their website, I learned that their product was described as being targeted at 15-30 year old females. Also thought to be 'the latest fashions at affordable prices'. 

Marketing can be defined as: 
‘The management process responsible for identifying, anticipating and satisfying customer requirements profitably.’ 
This is the task facing the marketing manager who must realize a company cannot serve all the customers in a broad market. The customers are too numerous and diverse in their buying requirements. Instead marketing managers can become market focused by identifying their target market, anticipating their needs and fine tuning products and marketing programs to successfully meet their needs. The Arcadia Groups Ltd is the UK’s largest clothing retailer, with over 2000 outlets. The group comprises seven brand names – namely Topshop, Topman, Evans, Wallis, Miss Selfridge, Dorothy Perkins and Burton. Each brand targets distinct market segments and many of them operate within leading positions in their respective markets. 

For this exercise we will look closely at the Topshop brand and its focus on the target market: 

Ø 15 – 30 Year old females 
Ø Who like pubbing, clubbing and have a sense of fun 
Ø Driven by a need to be fashionable and trendy 
Ø Like all trend setting magazines 
Ø Should remain loyal customers if the retailer maintains a reputation for being fashionable 

After some further research about finding a target audience I found that these are some of the main points of finding your audience for your band:

• Look at the age and gender of the people who would use your product ( take a survey).
• Find out your consumers income levels, this will make it easier to price your product.
• Notice the status of your target audience ( family,single,children). 

How do film makers profile their audiences?

It is much harder to find out information about a film audiences, however. Never the less one really excellent way is provided by exit polls witch are conducted when audiences leave film screenings. These are not always conducted because of the expense and when they are done, it is usually pre-release, in order to find out whether the film will hit the mark. I found some really useful data from the BFI website.

What did I discover from BFI exit polls about audiences?

I  used the BFI website to research films that are similar genre to the film opening I am creating. I then looked at the data and created a Pictochart to display the research. 

Click Here to view my Pictochart.

 

I used Pinterest to create a board on who our target audience may be. I looked a previous thriller films that may have a similar target audience to us and also the groups of people that our characters fall into. I used the knowledge that I had gained from my research to add other films that my target audience would also watch as I know trailers for similar genres of film are shown in the cinema. 

Click here to view my Pinterest and see the annotations I wrote for each pin.

PLANNING: DISTRIBUTION

I investigated and did research into how other companys distribue  their brand to their targeted audience.  I noticed when looking into how the Hunger Games Mocking Jay part 1 that they used the sites, Facebook, Twitter, youtube and an official website to do so. 

When creating my own film opening I am also going to create a Facebook and Twitter account to distribute information to our fans. 

Here is a case study I created on slide share of the Hunger Games Mocking Jay part 1 and how the film was distributed. 

Click Here

PLANNING:TARGET AUDIENCE

Click here to see the content I created on slideshare.