1. The importance of Audience, Market and Production Research
Audience Research is an important tool to study the characteristics of target audience for
various media including demographic and psycho-graphic details of the audience, their
exposure to various media, listening/viewing/reading habits, needs and tastes for various
media contents and moreover, to estimate the size of audience for various programmes and
programme ratings. Audience Research on the one hand provides programme feedback to
programme producers to prepare audience friendly programmes, and on the others
provides audience share for the various media contents to advertisers and marketers, which
in turn, helps in fixing rates for the various programmes and channels. With this said, it gives
consumer insight to the stakeholders and works as eyes and ears for the media
organisations.
Market research is for discovering what people want, need, or believe. Market research
should be part of your business strategy. It can be undertaken at numerous stages from pre
launch onwards. Therefore, the strengths that market research brings to the company are
the target audience’s psychographics. Market research helps you identify opportunities – If
you are planning to operate a new service and want to know the preconceived attitudes
people have then market research can help, not only in evaluating the potential for a new
idea, but also by identify the areas where a marketing message needs to improve. It can also
help shape a new product or service, identifying what is needed and ensure that the
development of a product is highly focused towards demand. Market research creates
benchmarks and helps you measure your progress. Early research may highlight glaring
holes in your service or short falls in your product, regular market research will show if
improvements are being made and, if positive, will help motivate a team.
Production research is always needed when developing a new product. It is research to
help give information on the characteristics of the product. It focuses on the production of a
product, in other words, how it’s made. For example, advertisements are all made to sell
themselves to the audience, so its down to the producers of the adverts to use production
research to get more information on characteristics. When organisations do production
research it helps them see an overview of the commercial viability, which is businesses skills
to be successful and gain profit. The company has to be commercially viable first otherwise
they won’t be as profitable as they want to be and will start to go downhill. When
organisations carry out research they gather demographics, which shows the characteristics
of the target audience or the population by their physical aspects such as age, sex and their
postcode. This is the same for a health and beauty industry. For example, Lynx deodorant
carries out research to gather demographics of their target audience, which then shows
their characteristics and their physical aspects. Once this is found, Lynx can then justify what
to do with the product and how to do it.