Question 3
indyaconway
Question 3
What have you learned from your target audience feedback?
Our Plan
Throughout the course, TA feedback was essential in order for us to give our audience what they are looking for. Our plan was to create a meaningful song which female's and male's can relate to on an emotional level as well as enjoying the lyrics and song.
Our Methods
Focus Groups
Questionaires
Flickr
Facebook
Conducting focus groups really helped us to interact face to face with our TA and and we got to hear their responses to our questions in person.
I liked sending out questionnaires for our TA to complete because it was straightforward and simple. We used this method to gather short responses which didn't require much explanation.
Flickr was a great way to get feedback from our photo shoots since all we had to do was listen to what the people wrote in the 'comment' section.
Since it's dominating in the world of social media right now we decided to reach out to people on Facebook.
Focus Group
Our focus groups played an huge role in
getting fast and detailed responses from
our TA. We conducted our "main" focus
group in October where Amy Morgan and
I sat down with a group of 6 other students
and discussed our initial plans for the video. From the question "Do you think our video sounds offensive to men?" we discovered that our TA would enjoy the music video more if Jason was shown more frequently in the video thus showing our audience a bit more of the back story. At this point we realized it would be beneficial to actually have a scene where we show Jason hitting Sophia.
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Our focus group was recorded and uploaded to SoundCloud.
https://soundcloud.com/morgan-bullock-956677719/ta-research
Focus Group
Once we had explained the
narrative we asked questions
such as "Do you understand the
narrative" "Which part of the narrative do you think we should focus more on?". All of the questions we asked were answered as we expected and we had a predominantly positive reaction. However the one thing that we flagged up was the fact that Jason is an abusive character which could represent males in a very demeaning manner.
Focus Group
To solve this problem we
decided to film flashback
scenes where Jason is
shown as a caring young man who really loved Sophia. We represented these flashbacks with vignette masks and highlighted the bad memories (e.g. the slap) in black and white tone.
Questionnaire
One month later we carried out a questionnaire to get feedback from music videos in general. For example we asked questions like "How do you consume music videos?" which was very important in our final decision of how we were doing to distribute our own music video. The results came back that most of our TA consumed music videos on YouTube and when asked to justify their answer, they said that is was because it is simple and easily accessible.
Due to our young TA finally decided to
upload our final music video to YouTube to
adhere to the needs of our TA.
Questionnaire
One of the most worrying responses we got back this year was that most of our TA didn't even buy CD's anymore! In response to this Amy, Morgan and I had to think fast and devise a way to get people interested in buying CD's. We thought that by advertising the CD in a way that makes the audience think that they might be missing out some of the special features we could persuade them to buy it. On one panel of the digipak we made it apparent that when you buy the CD you will also be buying extra content (two bonus tracks) such as an exclusive studio recording and a live performance track.
Flickr
I used Flickr as a means to get feedback from the public about which photos would work best for the panels on our digipak. This, like the focus group was useful in getting open ended answers and suggestions on what we could do in future photo shoots. Upon reflection we recognized that we were getting many comments back saying that we were breaking conventions in too many of our pictures due to the fact Sophia wasn't looking into the camera.
Flickr
We then had to plan another photo shoot to get Sophia to make direct eye contact with the camera. This is where we got the cover image for our digipak We deliberately made the cover the only photo on the digipak where she is looking into camera to give off a mysterious tone where people can fee her pain a hurt by not even being able to look into camera. In conclusion I love how intense the front panel of our digipak turned out and so did our TA on Flickr.
Facebook
Due to Facebook being one of the most popular forms of social media, we turned to it in order to advertise our music video and digipack. This was the best way to reach to our contemporary TA as young adults are constantly scrolling down their news feed.
So What's Changed?
At the start of the course Amy, Morgan and I had to come up with a concept for our music video (one that would really stand out from any other music video on an emotional level). By targeting our music video at an audience who might feel vulnerable about domestic abuse, it will not only give them something to relate to but will also encourage them to get out of a toxic situation.
Where we started...
As we developed our music video we expected our target audience to change as our ideas changed. However since we stuck to the concept of having a young woman as our star with a fairly relatable star image our target audience didn't vary much. Sophia was a character which we wanted people of both genres to relate to however this deemed quite difficult...
Our Stars Influence
Our music video took on quite the traditional route by the simple face that Sophia was female. As much as we tried creating a star that both men and women suffering from domestic abuse can relate to it was very difficult. Our target audience may have shifted slightly from a more equal gendered view of abuse to a slightly more female audience since the type of abuse shown in our video could have different emotional effects on different genders.
Men
Our final products do appeal to our target audience as found out from our final TA feedback. Our team sent out a last questionnaire to as many people within the age range and gender specification and the result was very positive as shown on the next page...
... where we finished
Bulmer and Katz
Throughout our project we were constantly thinking of Bulmer and
Katz uses and gratifications theory of 'Personal
Relationships'. We used our music video like how soap
operas are used to relate to people's
everyday life. However we got 'Gravity' to
relate to people suffering with
domestic abuse. Our goal was to
get those people to see
themselves as Sophia
and end their bad
relationship.
Our Final TA Results
Synergy
Males
Females
Our results were extremely positive when getting feedback for the way we created synergy through all three products.
100%
We had a great success in getting our TA to realize that not all men are the villain and that only this specific example (Jason) is. Med didn't seem to get offended at the face the abuse was towards a woman, which is what we feared would put them off. We did not want to lose a large portion of our TA just because of our stars image.
100%
Among all of the women we asked to be apart of for our final TA feedback two of them suffered from domestic abuse. They said they related to Sophia so much and we "did a great job at representing a negative relationship". MqQuail's personal identity and social interaction theory has been exhibited through our video quite well.
100%
