Target Audience research

Over the past view lessons we have discussed our target audience and done tasks to see whether a choice is the best for our genre and whether they would enjoy the teaser trailer, poster and magazine. As we had decided on a Romantic Comedy genre for our coursework we discussed and researched into what target audience are most interested in this genre. When watching other teaser trailers of Rom-Com genre such as 27 dresses, 10 things I hate about you and he’s just not that into you we found that just by watching them they were attracting us and that we were interested in them. This was a big help towards deciding on a target audience as we ourselves found them interesting. We then decided on a target audience of 13-19 teenage girls, as that is the age range we are in and if we were the audience we would be attracted and interested in it. When we had decided on having a 13-19 girl target audience we decided to do some more research and go and ask people who would come in this age range and see what genre of film they prefer and why. The common response from teen girls was Rom-Coms as they contain romance, love, girly stories that they fantasise about and wish would happen to them. Also they contain the comedy element which makes them more attractive to this audience and makes them more humorous to watch. As we have decided on this target audience we are going to try and include this in our short teaser trailer to appeal to our target audience and create something that teenage girls would happily pay money to go and see. We also chose this audience because when watching these teaser trailers they do not seem to be target at boys as they don’t contain elements that you would expect boys to like such as action movies with car chases and fight scenes. I think when a 13-19 teenage girl audience is watching Rom-coms they are an active audience as they can take what they want from the film and have different understandings of the films. Romantic comedy films consist of love and humour but the audience can take this in different ways as they can agree with the relationships or fantasise that it was them, wishing they were the characters. The audience can get different understandings of these films, as when I watch a film of this genre I may perceive one thing while when it is discussed other people may have different opinions.
The research I have done on target audience is basic questions asked to young girls in this target audience age range and finding their opinions and seeing if our decisions have been the right ones so far. I have also analysed posters and magazines front covers to see whether they attract me as I am in the target audience age range and enjoy rom-coms myself. This will help us to discover whether our chosen target audience will enjoy and be attracted to them. I have looked at 27 Dresses, Valentine’s Day, Finding Greta and 10 things I hate about you.