AUDIENCE RESEARCH

1. Film industries conduct various amounts of audience research in order to make
their product the best it can be; Focus groups, questionnaires, box office takings,
test screenings are carried out to create a successful product.
Focus groups are a group of people participating in a discussion about a product
before it is launched or to provide feedback on the product. Focus groups are
good for brainstorming ideas and understanding costumer vocabulary, helpful
gaining insight into perceptions and can reveal likes and dislikes. The audience is
only a selective audience this may not be beneficial because you don’t know who
will be included in this group; they may not be the same age as the target
audience.
Questionnaires consist of a number of questions for the purpose of gathering
information from respondents, they are cheap and do not require as much effortand
often have simple questions to gather information; simple questions may frustrate
respondents.
Box officeis where the tickets are sold to the public for admission; box officetakings is
the amount of ticketssold, whobrought the tickets meaning (age, gender) so the film
industry who produced the film can see whohas seen the film, if it was mainly the
targeted audience whosaw the film and if people not included in this audience watched
the film. This is beneficial because you can see if your movie was successful in bringing
in the targeted audience and even people not included in the audience watchedit.
A Test screening is a preview screening of a movie before its general release in order to
observe the audience reaction, the audience is selected froma cross-section of the
population and usually asked to complete a questionnaire to gather further feedback. An
advantage of test screening is that improvements can be made after and feedback can
also be positive. A disadvantage of test screenings you may get an audience that doesn’t
fit in to your target audience which is then not targeting the audience watchingthe
movie and they may or may not enjoy the movie, meaning all the feedbackwould be
negative. I found some evidence from (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Test_screening)
Test screenings showed negative audience reactions to an onscreen kiss between Denzel
Washington and Julia Roberts in the movie The Pelican Brief.