Audience Classification

The need to define audiences has been driven by commercial needs.  Many media businesses need to deliver audiences’ eyeballs, or ears, to advertisers in order to be profitable and so the audience needs to be categorised.

Durning my audience research I found out about 'The Registrar General’s Social Scale', which is a scale that the British Government uses to define the populace through their occupation.

This social scale has benefits as it can help to companies to select a target audience which suitable for their film. However it can also be criticised and crude and rigid.
There are other methods of selecting target audiences, such as 'VALS' Values, Attitudes and Lifestyles or Selby's Psychographic Clusters. These can be a more effective way of deciding upon a target audience and are not as rigid or crude as The Registrars General's Social Scale.

Values, Attitudes and Lifestyles
These are psychographic (psychographics is the study of personality, values, attitudes, interests, and lifestyles) variables.

• Actualisers: Successful, wealthy, dynamic people for whom image is important as an expression of their individuality.
• Fulfilleds: Mature people who are well-educated professionals. This group values order, knowledge and responsibilities.
• Achievers: Successful and career-orientated people. They are politically conservative and value the status quo. Image is important to them and they tend to buy established, well-known products.
• Experiencers: Young, impulsive and rebellious. They like new products and styles but soon tire of them and search for new novelties. They spend as much as they can afford on clothing, fast food, music and films.
• Believers: Conservative people who believe in traditional institutions, such as the Church, and in the importance of the family and community. Their lifestyle tends to be very routine. Their income is small but sufficient.
• Strivers: Tend to be unsure of themselves and have a low income. They are striving for approval from others, which they feel they could gain by ownership of possessions, most of which they cannot afford.
• Makers: Makers are do-it-yourself enthusiasts and tend to live a conventional, family life.
• Strugglers: Strugglers are on the lowest income and tend to be loyal to their favourite brands.

Selby's Psychographic Clusters

This is similar to the VALs system, but the Psychographic Clusters is a system invented by Keith Selby. His categories include:

• Trendies: who crave the admiration of their peers.

• Egoists: who seek pleasure.

• Puritans: who wish to feel virtuous.

• Innovators: who wish to make their mark.

• Rebels: who wish to remake their world in their own image.

• Drifters: who are not sure what they want.

• Drop-outs: who shun commitments of any kind.

• Traditionalists: who want things to stay as they are.

• Utopians: who want the world to be a better place.

• Cynics: who have to have something to complain about.

• Cowboys: who want easy money.

This research has helped me understand how to pick out a target audience that would be suitable for my film opening. For example, as a group we knew we wanted to target a younger audience so the categories our audience would come under for VALS would be, 'experiencers' and maybe 'strugglers' as our target audience would be mostly teenagers, so they would be on a low income.

However The Registrars General's Social Scale had not helped me when choosing my target audience. This is because our target audience is 17 to 24 year olds and The Registrars does not cater for people who are not committed jobs/careers.