What have you learned from your audience

feedback?Justine Mason

Focus GroupAfter creating our focus group, to ensure we were able to keep in contact with them, we created a Facebook group that enabled us to send our ideas and production work easily and receive comments and feedback from our target audience. This was essential as our main goal was to satisfy the audience.

Our focus group gave us an insight into the type of music video that fans of the folk genre wanted to see. From our questionnaire, we learnt about which editing techniques they wanted to see, as well as whether to include a narrative or not.

Feedback

After contacting our focus group to tell them we were going to use Gentlemen of Few’s song No Dime, we received lots of praise about the song, as many of them were fans of the band already. This made us confident knowing we were receiving feedback from fans of the band’s music, therefore knew we were targeting the correct audience.

These were some of the comments we received after revealing the song:

“I love that song! I think it would look so good using a narrative relevant to the song rather than abstract feelings.” – Joshua Cialis

“The song is good but the video definitely needs a storyline!” – Ferdy Brun

“I feel that the video for this should definitely be filmed in a rural surrounding. It just has that feel!” – Sophia Philpott

Taking these points on board, we decided to use a narrative relevant to the song and its lyrics, as this would make the song more memorable and meaningful to the audience. Since the song’s chorus repeats the line ‘girl, I’m coming home to you’, this influenced us to feature a couple in the narrative. We also wanted to film the music video in the countryside, as we felt this appealed to the folk genre.

Creative DecisionsI became very reliant on the focus group when creating my ancillary tasks, as I had to constantly inquire for opinions on ideas. For instance, when I was stuck between which front cover to use for my digipak, I sent a message to my focus group asking for their opinions. These were some of the comments I received which enabled me to make my decision.

“I prefer the second album cover. It’s brighter and more upbeat so I think it relates to their music more than the first cover.” – Ferdy Brun

“I like the second one best because its just more visually attractive.” – Laura Mason

“I like them both although the second one stands out more for me.” – Emily Thistleton

Music Video Feedback

After we had finished filming we uploaded the video to YouTube and sent the link to our focus group via the Facebook group. We asked them whether we had used their input sufficiently and fortunately they gave very positive feedback.“I love it! It really evokes the feelings seen in the lyrics.” – Laura Mason

“The storyline works really well with the upbeat song and the lyrics!” – Alex Rogers

“I like where the video is set! It works really well with the folk/nature theme” – Sophia Philpott

What Have I Learnt

I have learnt that using a focus group is very effective when trying to create a product based on ideas. It’s much easier to create a product that appeals to it’s target audience when they make up the focus group. Therefore, I knew the feedback and advice I was receiving came from people I was aiming to appeal to.