Audience Research

Introduction
In order to create a successful horror trailer, we needed to fully understand the specifics of our target audience as, with any media product, this plays a key role in whether or not the product achieves its goals. Our trailer aimed to attract and entice our audience; encouraging them to see this film, leaving un-answered questions by including mysterious moments in the trailer. To understand to the highest level the audience we were aiming our media product at, we conducted audience research. 

Methodology

We decided, as a group, that the most effective and efficient way of understanding our target audience was to create a questionnaire, through the website SurveyMonkey. This free survey website gave us an ideal, easy to use set-up in which to organise our questionnaire. We used social networking giants Facebook and Twitter to promote our questionnaire to our target audience, who are likely to use social networking sites like these. Also, with the collective number of online 'friends' we obtained by all four group members, we gained a higher response count. You can find details of how our group used SurveyMonkey and other technologies here. As for questions, we decided, due to the nature of SurveyMonkey, that we would keep the questionnaire relatively short, not pro-longing the experience and therefore boring the participant with a never-ending list of questions. However the data was still kept concise with effective questions that gained both quantitative data; age, gender, company when attending the cinema, how often the individual watches horror movies and preference of different sub-genres within horror, and also qualitative data from the audience from asking questions that refrained from using a multiple choice format, thus giving the participant more freedom with their answer and making the range of responses more varied.  

Results From Audience Research

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Results
Through the use of media promotion, we obtained 40 fully complete responses. Our results had coincidentally fallen 50% male and 50% female, which created a fair comparison between the two genders and was very useful when gathering data. We organised the age question in order to achieve more responses within the target age group of the horror genre (17-25), in which, I believe, we were successful in doing so. Both males and females had almost identical preferences in sub-genres of horror. Questions like "what are they key features that you expect to see in a horror film trailer?" created quantitative data, along with having qualitative from the multiple choice questions, and allowed the participant to elaborate on their answer, giving more of an understanding to their answer. All questions asked and responses received can be seen in the above slideshow.

Analysis
Our group certainly took the results from our audience research on board and attempted to use the knowledge we had gained from our questionnaire and transfer it effectively into our trailer. The charts and data gained shows a fair representation of the target audience of a horror product, with the lack of the 'other' option, when presented, rarely being used by participants showing that the questions were easy to understand, well constructed and relevant to the audience we had targeted. The information we gained from question 6, which asked about most effective settings for a horror film, was implemented in our trailer. Originally, a lot of the trailer was to be shot outside, but, after conducting the survey, we came to a group decision that horror within the home would be more effective. Many of the 'key features' that were said to be expected in a trailer in question 8 were used in the creation of our trailer, e.g. "jumpy bits", "suspense" and "fast paced action scenes". The 50/50 split in the gender of our audience gave us no indication as to what gender our product should be mainly aimed at, however, from previous knowledge, we understood the audience for horror films is predominantly male.