Researching the Target Audience

Please click on this image in the view window so that it opens full screen and you will be able to read it. This was a mindmap of initial thoughts around target audience when I began researching this topic.

I think that the target audience for my trailer is the traditional target audience of 15-35 years old. This covers the key demographic for our film and also hits the most popular media audience as these are often assumed to be people who consume a lot of media and have money to spend on it. I think our audience belongs in this younger age bracket because generally, this is the group that the thriller genre seems to appeal to. This article is about horror, but I feel many of the points are relevant to psychological thriller too:

http://constructinghorror.com/index.php?id=60

This says that people like feeling scared because it's like the appeal of the forbidden. I think our genre works like this too. We are all scared of going mad / having nobody believe us and this is why we like films that show people going to dark places in their minds. This suggests that we are scared enough of this to pay for solutions:

http://www.hypnosisdownloads.com/fears-phobias/going-crazy

When I tried to research "who watches psychological thrillers?" I noticed that no articles came up identifying a target audience, but lots came up saying what poeple's favourite psychological thriller was:

The fact that there are so many of these suggest that they are very popular films. Having looked at some of these lists, the majority of films included are from 2000s , so this backs up the idea that these films are popular with a young audience.

My film is non-gender specific as it has an appeal for both genders. Male viewers may enjoy the action and suspense sequences and female viewers may enjoy the psychological drama. There is often a strong female character in these dramas to help this appeal.

This article by a film writer / producer explains his target audience for his film he is writing and says that the female audiene is important: