R+P Post 4: Audience groups of interest

We are considering a wide variety of audiences, that encompass a wide variety of people, although we are skewing towards an audience that we ourselves are part of, to make some of our decisions and influences and so on a bit easier. Thus, we decided to base our audience research at this stage on things other than age, such as genre, so that we could include our age group in the main target audience, and then skew towards other things later, such as gender, once we have finally figured out some more details of what we are going to construct.

To this end, we decided to create a survey that included some of the genres and other criteria we were considering, and sent it out to people who were part of our age group, to see what kinds of people were receptive to what things. In the end we discovered that an audience of people from 12-25 years old might be best, as we were receiving a lot of good feedback from this group in regards to our preliminary ideas for a band, song, and video. We discovered certain gender skews in some genres, but possibly the most interesting thing we discovered was that people tend to like and even copy the fashions of their favourite bands and genres, regardless of genre. Colour scheme was important to people too. This information will no doubt be very important to us later.

An extract from the SurveyMonkey survey, from the question dealing with artist image. People talked about fashion and colour above all when discussing the image of favoured artists, despite prompts to do with "style" and "persona" alongside clothing and colour. Also of note is that the two responses pictured here are from people within the 12-25 age group, and the artists they mention are from very different genres. Click to enlarge.

Overall the survey was a good tool for us, as we found out plenty of information to do with the audiences for our preliminary ideas. Once we make some of the key choices, we will have a good base for constructing and image for our target audience.