Focus Group

The focus group involved my media production group who are Gagan, Navneet and I and our media class as our audience who gave us advice/opinions about our production idea at the end. In the focus group we mentioned a brief introduction of our narrative, the research and planning process that relates to our idea and who would be our main target audience and gender. As this is our first idea we received great comments from our media class which was very useful as it helped us to change and improve our production to be successful. 

Navneet started off by introducing the group and the title to our production idea, she referred to the genre of the programme which is a ‘Teen drama’ genre. Moreover Gagan explained the research and planning we had done to get our production idea, she spoke about the five television programmes we had chosen to analyse which also included elements of these shows in our own idea. Gagan mentioned the five television shows, unique selling point and explained why and what part of the concept we chose that relates to our idea such as using ‘Hollyoaks’ can demonstrate the dramatic effect in the programme toward our idea. Navneet then told us about when the programme would be shown on television including how long it would be and what channel it would be broadcasting in. I then continued to the target audience of our programme which were an audience targeted at 16-25 year old who mostly attract females as it would have concepts of a relationship, arguments and more female character than male. 

After Gagan explained the narrative again we got feedback from our class. We found out that none of the male audience in our class would recommend this programme as they think it is more associated with aspects of females therefore they gave us ideas which would attract the male audience more. 

Suggested ideas to make our production better: 

Samuel: Consider male characters to attract the male audience, also to think about our narrative more and characters roles. 

Harpal and Hamsa: wouldn't watch the programme as it doesn't appeal to him. 

Vinisha and Naima: Suggested she would watch the programme only if the idea was more originally as she has seen a similar narrative. 

Harvey: Liked our flashback idea however thought the audience would be confused to keep track on six characters. 

Zulq: Thinks the storyline will be boring after the dramatic scene so re consider the storyline, also males would be attracted to the programme if there are attracting females. 

Jinan: Characters need to be older as the target audience are 16-25 so the audience can look up to these characters, she feels the programme is like an E4 evening show. Should consider doing multi stranded narratives to establish most of the characters also the programme would leave cliff-hangers on some characters so the programme would be continued. Each episode should be different with different storyline. 

Halsey: Reconsider about the characters and involve some male character to attract the male audience more. We cannot show a programme which contains strong language before the watershed time as we chose to programme the show at 9pm on weekdays and 3pm on weekends, furthermore the brief mentions the programme has to be pre-watershed (before 9pm therefore no strong language). Re-think our storyline as the audience has seen the storyline before, therefore change it to make it new and engage a wider audience. 

From the ideas above my group suggested changing the narrative/storyline as we weren't attracting the male audience much. The comments were very useful and helped use improve our idea to make a better production which suits the brief more. We have reconsidered our target audience as we are going to change the narrative too. The focus group has really impacted our group as we were unaware that we were not attracted the male audience, also not following the brief properly, therefore this was really helpful to make our production better to get good grades. 

Our groups intended target audience for our E4 programme will be attracting more females than males who aged around 16-25 years. We have suggested the female audience would be amused to our programme more than males as our programme would have females as the dominant characters. The programme would be attracted to more British nationality audience as the programme is from the UK. As the programme would be teen drama and would be scheduled for 9pm every weekday, I think the target audience would be mostly teenagers and young adults as they have come back from school, college, university etc. and would be relaxed to watch the show late in the evening. Our programmes social economic audience would be class C2-E as this audience are associated of ages 16-25, this class would have an audience who are attending school or any education or have unskilled manual jobs. This class is appropriate as the programme also has characters that are from the C2-E class demographic. Lastly the psycho-graphic audience would be targeted at strugglers and reformers as the characters seek for escape and enlightenment, this audience would be able to relate to the characters portrayed in the programme.