Market research rationale

Market research is the term used when gathering data from your chosen market about their consumer needs and preferences. It is vital to conduct this thoroughly as to create a product that fits the needs and wants of the consumer you need to understand what they are and how to achieve them. There are various techniques that we will use throughout including focus groups and questionnaires, which shall give us a comprehensive view of our target market's ideas and thoughts.

To create a convincing and professional trailer we'll need to gain a full understanding of what our audience want and expect from a film trailer. To gain this knowledge we need a direct link between ourselves and our audience - a questionnaire will acheive some of our objectives and ascertain some useful information. Questionnaires are a quick and easy method to achieve a large amount of useful qualitative and quantitative data. However, they do have some drawbacks. Firstly, participants may give socially desirable answers (ones that they feel are acceptable) and not really give their true opinion. The problem with this is that we'll collect false data and our product won't fit the viewers' true needs and wants. Secondly, If the questionnaire is too long, participants may get bored and tick/cross the first box that they see without properly reading the question. This again will give us information that is void; the data we've collected will neither help nor contribute to a professional, effective and succesful product. Lastly, when completing a questionnaire participants tend to keep their answers very brief, therefore detailed data on why a participant likes something will not be gathered. However, a questionnaire, done properly, can help gather relevent and extremely uselful data. So this method will allow us to interpret primary data, so we can manipulate our products to suit the 'audience preference.'

We will also use a focus group. A selected group of people from within our target market will be asked more open ended questions so we can direct and form the shape of our questions. We'll voice record the discussion as it's less invasive than a camera and allows for more creative influence than a simple tick-box questionnaire. Combining this with the questionnaires the finer details, in which a public questionnaire may not reach, can be discussed and ironed out. Before we begin creating our products we need to find out a few key things to ask our audience. We need to find out not just what it is the audience likes, but why they like it - in effect, why the product works for them. We need to find out what and why they're attracted to products, what type of products they like and what they'd like to see in a newly created product. These areas will be covered in greater detail in our questionnaire.

Immediate thoughts for a questionnaire:

• What attracts you to watch a film trailer?
• What type of horror film? Psychhological or killer?
• Which trailer is your favourite? Why is this trailer your favourite?
• How long should a trailer be to be at its most effective?
• What colours best describes a horror genre?
• What title would best suit a horror film?
• What typography would best suit a horror film?
• Which trailer most attracts you? Why?
• Which poster most attracts you? Why?
• Which DVD cover most attracts you? Why?

These potential questions dig into what the audience like and expect and also the reasoning behind their decisions. The questionnaire we produce will largely be a 'closed question' questionnaire because this will give us definitive answers and ideas that we can use as a basis for our production. We'll produce the questionnaire with multiple choice questions too; this will limit what the audience can say while giving a little chance for creative influence.  WHY? We'll also base some of the questionnaire around an online stimulus; meaning we'll show them 3 of the trailers and ask them questions around that. (The 3 examples will be of varying style and length etc to give us an over few of all types of the genre.) It'll also be very important to get what they dislike about the film; or what they think is missing from it. Under this comes a chance to ask them what their general expectations of a horror film are - this will give us chance to base the production to tick the criteria of our audiences needs.