Group: Audience Research (concept)

We have tested our concept for the music video 'Eat That Up, It's Good For You' with our potential audience, in two ways, to gain insight into how our potential audience would react to the music video that we have in mind for this track.


Method 1 : Survey Monkey


Our first method was use of the online surveying tool, 'Survey Monkey', which allows us to write a number of questions and then give the questions out to a larger group of people and collect the results. When we carried out of research on Survey Monkey, we were still in the early stages of the creative process, so were testing a number of ideas to see which direction our music video should take. 

Here are some of the questions we asked. Other questions included 'warm up questions', such as their age, favourite music genre and how much they liked the song. These questions are more useful, as they have given us insight into the music video that the audience would expect when seeing a music video for this song. 


When asked about the sort of images that people associate with this song, the most common words included 'sun', 'outside' and 'energy/upbeat'. This reflected our initial ideas for the video as we wanted a happy, bright feel to the music video. However, the sunshine could be an issue, as we will be filming our music video in the autumn and winter months, so are not able to guarantee sunny weather. However, we can still give our video an upbeat, happy feel to it. 

We also felt that an element of humour was important in a music video. However, our audience research showed us that people felt that aspect was far less important than others. This has influenced our creative process, as we now are putting less emphasis on making the music video humorous, and although we may keep a funny aspect to the video, it won't be the most important factor. 

Another of the important questions that we asked was where our potential audience felt that the video should be set. Here, our potential audience agreed with our instinct, that the video should have a sub-urban feel to it. We have therefore decided to film all of the exterior locations in Maidstone, which gives us a lot of scope in terms of filming locations, and also has a distinctly sub-urban feel to it.






Method 2 : Focus Group


Our second method for collecting audience research, and actually testing our concept in more details was through the use of a focus group. Our methodology in this method of audience research was to give the four people that we questioned on our concept options of how they rate the concept initially, and then discuss in detail how they envisaged the music video looking. We gave each member a list of the questions, so that they could write their thoughts whilst we discussed them.


We started the focus group by having everybody listen to the track all the way through, and then give everybody a moment to consider their opinion of the track and what their initial thoughts for a music video were (we asked what they thought, and there were no suggestions early on for what they thought the music video should look like, apart from results which were similar to that of our Survey Monkey research, with responses like 'upbeat').


We then gave each member of our focus group the following treatment :


"A split narrative, following two lines of action which show the possible consequences of taking a decision, one to face up to responsibility, the other to run away from it. The video is ambiguous, and the audience can decide which decision the main character 'chooses'". 


Our focus group responded well to our concept, feeling that a split narrative was a strong concept, and that it would be more memorable as a music video, as well as standing up to repeatability, which was a very important factor to us. We were pleased that members of the focus group, who are the sort of people who would actually view the music video liked our concept and felt that it would work. 


We also asked what they believed our main challenges with this concept would be.  The group all agreed that our main challenge would be in maintaining two narratives clearly, but not too obviously. We have since discussed this as a group, and have agreed that it is a fine balance, between making it subtle enough that we are not giving it away too much to the audience, but at the same time we need our audience to be able to work out what the music video is about. 


Our other important question was whether the music video we have envisaged fits in the track. We wanted to discuss this with the focus group, as we were concerned that our new ideas wasn't particularly based on the track. However, our our focus group felt that the concept fits the track well, although one person (see questions above) was not sure about the idea of pregnancy being the cause of the decision.


In conclusion, we are pleased with the audience research, as in the most part it is confirmed our instincts about the video that we are creating, but has also shaped our direction, for instance not focusing too heavily on humour. We will use the audience research we have worked on the develop our concept further.