Question 3: What have you learned from your audience feedback?

How we used audience 'Uses and gratifications' theory to appeal to our audience:

When planning and producing our three media texts, we always had to keep in mind our target audience of Rnb, Pop and Street music genre fans in mind.

We needed to be able to effectively appeal to our audience through either and/or all of the three media texts we created in order to make them buy into the D4MES brand via buying their merchandise/album and becoming a fan. For us to do this, we used techniques referenced by Blumer and Katz's Uses and Gratifications theory.

1) Personal Identity

By having completely contrasting personalities for each group member, it provides the audience with many options of aspirational band members, whom they could either identify themselves with or find models of behaviour in.

For example Monigal is presented as the sporty, energetic member of the band who's just as cool and as tough as the guys (if not better). This may encourage girls, especially young ones, who are afraid of trying to break the stereotypical girl who can't/ doesn't play sports or is active.

The music video also portrays the group members as strong women who can take charge of the love relationships they're in. This would empower and inspire many women as there're few media texts that put women in a power role.

2) Surveillance (Inform)

Our website takes on the more of the responsibility of gratifying the audience with information than the music video/album do. The proliferation of web technology (web 2.0) and portable devices mean that the information content that our audience would be looking for to gratify that need is easily available to them.

3) Personal Relationships

Social media features on our website
 provide the audience a relationship with
the artists

Most of the interactive parts of
the website are what provided
the personal relationships
gratification for our
audience 

Throughout the music video, our audience are given an insight into the social interaction of friendship between the girl group. Friendship/companionship is a social interaction all humans strive towards and is the one of the ultimate gratification we can provide the audience with. They can  aspire to having the same close-knit, tight relationship with their circle of people like D4MES is portrayed to have throughout the music video. This is a gratification included in many girl group music videos, since the USP for a group of artists is that they are a GROUP so even if they may not like each other or get along in real life, their music videos and marketing campaigns are usually constructed so that it looks like they are.

Example: The Saturdays

Example: Neon Jungle

4) Diversion/Entertainment

Performance music videos are known for their 'engaging' nature, with fast-paced, discontinuous editing and the artists in a mode of movement/action that catches the attention of the viewer. From our anonymous online survey feedback, we found that our music video was successfully able to entertain our audience. For example with...

Monica's rap

Silhouette and moving spotlight

1) Every group members verse having it's own variation of the typical 'love' story narrative and a different style of editing, for example Monica's editing was more dynamic and 'in your face' than other scenes

2) Fast paced editing with quick cuts to keep the audience on their toes and in suspense of what's coming up next

Fast-paced, discontinuous editing

Choreography

We were able to gain audience feedback through an anonymous online survey I created using SurveyMonkey (an example of some of the questions can be found below). We also interviewed those who fit into our target audience of young Rnb/Pop/Street music fans and asked our peers to give responses after watching/ previewing our texts during the construction stage.

Our online survey via Surveymonkey

Using surveymonkey was a great form of feedback as it helped us during the decision process of the construction period by giving us an understanding of what was good/ needed improvement. 

Using the online survey also helped us realize that although we had already decided a target audience, in reality it seemed to turn out to be different to who we had thought D4MES would appeal to, as you'll see below.



What we learned from our feedback during the construction stage and how we improved from it:

Another type of feedback we collected was through a focus group interview. This was effective because each person was encouraged by the other to give as much detail as they could in their constructive comments, thus allowing a lot of in-depth discussion about what we could improve. Please watch the video below as I have annotated our focus group's comments in order to analyse our feedback.



I learnt from this focus group discussion that people are very quick and able at deducing whether the construction of a star identity is 'constructed' and therefore 'fake', thus making me realize that we needed to take a lot of caution and precision in how we make our artists come across to our viewers- that we need to make them seem as 'real people' and natural as possible.