Researching the Target Audience

This is the mindmap I created when first thinking about target audience. I tried to consider the usual demographics that I saw in my research - age, gender and class. Although I have put down some ideas in my mindmap, I actually found all of these categories more problematic. It is becoming more unusual to consider class as a real audience issue as the boundaries between social classes and their tastes are now very blurred. However, I do think there is a class issue associated with our kind of genre. The teen drama high school setting is often represented as a very snobbish environment and there is usually an elite group who are elite as much for their material status as their characteristics. "Gossip Girl" is a good example of this, but it is common in teen drama and in chick flicks. The main character is often from a more disadvantaged background and therefore the audience is more aligned with them. Therefore I think the target audience is probably middle class enough to enjoy seeing the elite get their come uppance but not very working class where the issues seem irrelevant.

In terms of age, teen dramas are obviously aimed at teenagers, but this is also not as simple as it sounds as adults often like teem drama too as the issues they tend to look at are universal. Twilight has a big following of older women and I would imagine that a film like ours will attract women of all ages, whether of the same age as the case or older but watching nostalgically.

I think the gender of our audience is the most complicated so I did some further research:

This article by Owen Glebiberman states that it's too easy to say that men don’t really like chick-flicks/romantic comedies.  It suggests that the gender difference is that women like cheesy/ unrealistic romantic comedies/chick flicks anyway despite seeing they are bad, whereas men only like 'good' ones. I disagree with thi.s I think most women enjoy chick-flick because they enjoy watching situations that may at times be exaggerated but are situations they can relate to. I also think watching other females struggling or overcoming these situations makes women feel better about their own lives, therefore making a chick-flick a comfortable/ enjoyable thing for a woman to watch. I also think that it is unfair to suggest that male viewers demand quality - there are many poor films of all genres out there that command large audiences, so men can't be that demanding across the board. However, I would say that our genre does have a more direct appeal to women as they are more clearly targeted and therefore the issues raised are easier to relate.

This blog states that women should not watch chick flicks because they ‘corrupt our minds and make us believe in fairy-tales’. I understand what the blogger means - these films do sell the idea that a happy ending is all about finding the right guy. However, I do not believe this is the case; it is obvious in most chick-flicks that things are exaggerated to make it ‘film commercial’, I think watching chick-flicks is like ‘therapy’ for women showing that problem can be resolved. The only problem with chick flicks, which commenters have stated in the blog, is that women can compare themselves to the characters. That is why as a group we have decided to make our chick-flick as near reality as it can be, setting it in a state school in a town, just so the viewer can picture themselves in these situations rather than wonder why there life is not like that. I think it is an over-exaggeration that ‘women should never watch chick-flicks’ I don’t think it is damaging to society, and chick-flicks can be comical and enjoyable. The point is that there is a huge and obvious gap between these films and real life, which the viewer would have to work hard to overlook.

Setting our chick-flick in a high-school attracts a large age range for a viewer. Someone aged 12 and into their teenage years will be able to relate to the daily stresses of high-school, but and older viewer would have experienced high-school too and could equally understand the themes featured in them.