Audience research provided valuable insights that informed the creation of the promotional package. Conducting surveys and focus groups revealed that the target audience was most interested in the music itself and wanted a personal message from the artist. This guided decisions like including the artist's message in the digipak and website. Playing a song for participants helped understand the mood it conveyed, influencing the sad, slow-paced music video. Feedback also showed a preference for visual art and countryside imagery, which shaped designs of the hand-painted digipak interior and video locations. Multiple rounds of audience testing helped refine elements like the logo, digipak cover design, and website content.

1. Question Three.
What have you learnt from audience
research?

2. Audience research is defined as communication research that is conducted on specific to
demographic. Audience Research was a vital tool in understanding the needs of our target
demographic. Throughout the process of creating the production package we asked our
target demographic for feedback in on whether out product meets the needs of our chosen
audience. This is important because we are creating a commercial promotional package so
as an institution we must supply prospective consumers with their demands in order to
make money. Our Primary target demographic is 16-24 year old females with males age 17-
32 being the secondary audience. Audience research gave us the ability to know whether
we were track with our design and ideas. When the target audience responding positively
to our work showed us we were on the right path. Negative audience research showed us
that we needed to do more research in this area and reconsider our ideas, as at the end of
the day it’s all about pleasing our target audience and catering to their needs. Our target
audience are digital natives which meant we could contact them through social networking
sites and use websites such as SurveyMonkey to collect data. Due to this our target
audience is more likely to have more of an interest in the artists website than digital
immigrants would.

3. Creating a questionnaire and distributing it via Survey Monkey, was the first piece of
audience feedback the group conducted. This helped us discover what types of things our
target audience found essential in a production package and also what they would like to
see. Being a niche audience many responded that they would like to see a message from
the artists to make the product more personal. We decided to follow through with this idea
and placed a message from the artist on the digipak as well as the home page of the
website. This allowed the audience to feel a more intimate connection with the artist. Our
artists is a small upcoming artist for a niche audience, making the information and they way
he responds to fans very personal and unique. This allowed fans to feel a bond with him.
The alternative genre audience demand a unique visual style from there artists, this
allowed us to be creative with the design of our product. The survey results also showed
the fans had little care for the music video and were more interested in the actual quality of
music. This is a recurring theme in the alternative genre, where the sound is more
important than how an artist looks or how outgoing the music video is. ¼ of the people
who answered our survey also said they don’t look at artists websites, again showing little
interest in any of the products other than the songs themselves. Even though our target
audience don’t take a huge interest in our production package we still wish for it to look
professional and unique, so it represents Doug Miller in the correct way and attracts the
secondary audience. The results also symbolized the importance of a track list, this
influenced our design of the digipak. Making sure the track list was easy to read and visible
from the outside.

4. Our second piece of audience feedback involved Samara and I playing our chosen song to a sample of our
target audience and asking what this made them feel and think about. This allowed us to generate ideas for
the music video and understand the general direction and feel the music video should contain. Many of the
participants said the song made them feel relaxed this is usually linked to a slow pace video, so we deiced to
have the video pace and speed of events slow and calming to fit with the mood of the song. They also said
the song made them feel sad, we used this in our story plot of the music video, With the music video
containing a darkened story containing death. The group decided that the music video should contain
iconography that the audience can relate to.

5. We went on to do a focus group to see the audiences
relationship with music videos, digipaks and websites of
similar artists to see what stands out for them and what
they respond to positively and negatively. This research
showed the importance of visual art as all the participants
responded really highly to this. We used this information
throughout our promotion package resulting in us having
the inside of the digipak completely hand painted, giving it
a unique look which stands out to the audience. They
responded negatively to long introductions in the music
video saying it made them loose focus and interest, we
made sure that we wouldn’t have a similar issue with our
own video. So our video contains short cuts, constantly
changing scenes and time patterns, to keep audience
interested. The participants also rated countryside shots
and scenes highly as this gives them something to relate to
and symbolises being relaxed and freedom. As you can see
our production package contains a large range of
countryside shots.

6. Audience feedback was also taken
into consideration when deciding
which font to use for the artists logo,
this was done by the group picking a
range of fonts they found suitable,
then asking target audience members
to pick the one they liked the most.
The target audience agreed with our
highest preference front. Which
motivated the group, due to it
displaying we were on track with our
design ideas. We did similar audience
feedback on our choice of colour
schemes, however as they couldn’t
see this with our product, as a whole,
they couldn’t accurately pick which
scheme would fit the products best.

7. The digipak front cover came under a lot of scrutiny from
audience feedback. The first design incorporated the logo
design and different pictures of the countryside. The
audience also responded negatively to the cover of the
digipak, which was a little disheartening due to the fact I had
spent so long on it. But they did make a valid point that the
colours of the cover didn’t correlate well with the hand
painted picture Claire had drawn. This lead to me redesigning
it. Looking at similar artists for ideas and taking into
consideration the autumn leaves colour scheme, when the
audience reviewed this design. They said it lacked impact
due to the light autumn colours and there being no point of
focus. This lead me to do a more simplistic design, with the
dear logo using the strong autumn colours as a point of
focus. The target demographic mentioned the colours should
be arranged from behind a part of the image, to make it suit
the audience better. This gave it more of a focus point and
lead to the audience rating it highly when we conducted
reviews. By gaining qualitative feedback on the front cover I
was able to create a product which fitted well with designs in
the rest of the promotion package. However If I had done a
large amount of target audience research into what type of
design they would of liked to of seen on the front cover of
the digipak, there would have been a higher chance I
wouldn’t need to of done three different designs.

8. The audience feedback on the first draft of the digipak and
website was the most vital of feedback we received. Our
participants responded negative to lyrics being available on
the website saying “A fan would go look it up if they really
wanted to know.” This resulted in the removing of the lyrics
being available on the homepage. Items such as the pop-up
couldn’t receive a large amount of feedback due to it only
being fully made on the last day, however I wished we had
collected more feedback on this area as it appeared
unrealistic in a professional product. Overall the audience
research feedback taught us what the target audience found
vital and unimportant such as the lyrics and the feedback
worked well as a guideline to see out construction was on
the right tracks.

9. THANK YOU FOR READING