Evaluation: Question 3

Question 3- What have you learned from you audience feedback?

Throughout my research and development gaining audience feedback has been very important because of my demographic audience. My artist's target audience demographic are female 16-23 year olds who are creative with eccentric, quirky and girly interests in music and other lifestyle products. The age group of my audience meant that introducing a personal and relatable artist image was extremely important. To make sure that I was creating this audience/ artist relationship effectively I carried out a variety of feedback focus groups, questionnaires and Facebook posts in order to understand the target audience more.
Here is the feedback focus group with four people who fit the target audience. We showed them the rough cut of our video. We hoped to discover in the feedback if our target audience 'read' the video in the preferred way. We wanted the video to be light hearted and girly whilst also possessing an indie edge seen through more quirky, entropic and vintage features.
The feedback was very positive with the group understanding and reading the text well. They read the video as being quite 'quirky' containing 'things you wouldn't expect', positive feedback as this is an aspect of contrast that we hoped would be read and appreciated by our target audience.

The feedback group understood and felt the relatable tone we were trying to achieve saying 'you showed people the same age (as us)'. They also felt that the mise-en-scene with the 'girly cupcakes' appealed to the age group and gender. It was clear that they were gaining a unifying and relatable feeling through watching the video as they describes the close up shots as 'connecting'.

Within our music video we interpreted various intertextual references that would require our audience to have a certain level of cultural capital. We tried to select references that would suit our audiences level of cultural knowledge for example the lyrics on cards in our video were inspired by a viral video 'Free Hugs' but also the music video 'Subterranean home sick blues' by Bob Dylan. We thought that the reference to an online viral video would be understandable and recognizable to a online generation like our target audience whilst the Bob Dylan video would fit into our audience's indie musical preferences.
I found in our feedback that the group felt that some of these features were 'entropic' and 'quirky'.
We also used the intertextual reference to the olympic countdown as it is so current and we felt that this would fit the cultural capital of a very wide demographic not just our target audience as the olympics were such a widely watched event.

We gained some really valuable suggestions on how we could improve the music video with the group suggesting 'more performance and more movement'. The feedback group felt that this would make the video more conventional and identifiable as a music video.

We really focused on improving the narrative to performance ratio within the video and feel that we have successfully added a significant amount of performance shots in order to fit our indie genre. The group also suggested different shot 'levels' and shot types which we also added to the video in order to have a good variety of shots. We hoped that by adding a wider variety of shots (as suggested in feedback) the video would be read by our target audience as more relatable; close up shots of our performer would create an audience/ artist relationship whilst a variety of different shot types along side this would amount to an attention maintaining, exciting music video.

I also gained audience feedback in the very early stages of my coursework when we asked people to fill in questionnaires after watching our pitch. I feel that this literary form of feedback was very effective as it allowed the audience to process there thoughts and give us carefully considered responses.
I posted the questionnaire and responses as a blog post. Here is a link:

http://graceludlowcollegea2mediablog.blogspot.co.uk/2012/10/pitch-feedback.html

We based the question on genre, audience, narrative and brand image. The question on brand image and mise-en-scene particularly gained positive responses with the audience demonstrating their understanding of the 'quirky style' and 'focus on fashion'. This was evidence of the audience demonstrating that they were using their cultural capital to understand and recognize the current and trendy mise-en-scene.

In the production of my print products I have also gathered audience feedback. I wanted both the digipak and magazine to be aesthetically pleasing and appealing to a my target audience so I asked them for the initial thoughts on font colour.
I used email to send these font and background combinations:

Here is the feedback: 

Natasha Lee:

Hey Grace,

I think the pink one looks best. The middle one doesn’t really stand out enough.

I love the collage background – looks very quirky and effective for genre.

Hannah Davies:
I think they all look good. But I prefer the pink colour font as it stands out from the collage background. Also as our target audience are girls it will be more appealing to them.

From the feedback I learnt that I needed to make the font colour and the contrast with the background more striking in order to catch the attention of my audience. The feedback also indicated that pink with its girly and feminine connotations would appeal to my specific demographic the most. The response also clearly indicated that the font experiments were in keeping with the coherency of the promotional package and that the audience were understanding and reading these visual links clearly. 

For feedback on my digipak I filmed a feedback focus group with Jade and Beth; two people who fit into my audience demographic. 

In the Feedback Jade and Beth demonstrated a clear understanding of the brand image through my use of visual communication. For example 'the different textures used are really effective as they link to the genre of indie'. I was glad that the feedback signalled that the collaged design was effectively linking the visual house style with the artist's genre conventions and that the target audience were reading these genre conventions, that we aimed to portray, clearly. The group also used their cultural capital in order to understand that the shots types were typical of the indie genre: 'Different shots of artist are quite indie'.

This focus groups cultural capital was also hugely beneficial in their constructive criticism; they expressed how they felt the positioning of the barcode was not typical of indie digipaks they had seen before. I took this idea on and moved the barcode to the conventional position in order to create a professional looking product.

The feedback group expressed the need for a more clear sense of communication and VIP feeling that extra online content provides. They felt that making the website and social network links 'a bit more bold and a bit more clear' would improve this aspect of the digipak greatly.

Overall, I have found the various forms of feedback throughout my coursework very useful in clarifying that my products were communicating the correct brand image. The ideas of improvements have also been a great help. Feedback allows you to look at your work from a different and angle, noticing things you had not before. 
The feedback also really allowed me to understand if my products were being read and understood correctly and clearly by the target audience. I feel that the feedback has greatly contributed the success of my promotional pack in all aspects from house style and brand continuity to narrative understanding and communication of genre conventions to name a few examples.