DEAN COSTELLOE

What is a target demographic?

A target demographic (or market) is a group of customers in which a company has decided to aim its marketing efforts towards. This includes everything down to the merchandise and also the product itself. Without a target market, it is impossible to know who you are aiming your film at, as a well-defined market is the most important element in marketing.

 

What demographic do Social Realism films usually target?

The audiences in which the Social Realism genre usually target vary depending on the films codes and conventions; e.g using a young main character would imply that the film would appeal to a younger audience.  A popular social realism movie ‘Kidulthood’ was largely targeted between the ages of 13-25, due to the nature of the movie and also the cast involved. The culture in which the film is set around and also the events that take place in the movie, such as the swearing, action and drug references would appeal much more to the modern youth. However, other social realism films such as ‘Billy Elliot’ were targeted predominantly for families as it is a happy family movie. Social realisms in this sense are shown to apply to broad target audiences, with early social realism movies such as ‘Spare Time (1939)’ appealing largely towards the older generation of people. Because of this, it proves that social realism films apply to nearly all target demographics as they can widely vary in content.

 

Finding our Demographic

In order to decide which sort of audience we would be targeting with our film, we decided to pick out the codes and conventions and work out what sort of age group would be enjoying the film, and deciding what goes into the film because of this. For example, the main character in our movie is a young man, and the clothes he wears depicts this as it is common for somebody of this age to be casually wearing a t-shirt and jeans. We have added in many elements of a social realism film based on emotion, such as heartbreak, joy, anger etc, as it accurately depicts all the emotions in which a teenager or young adult would go through in the process of growing up, therefore we decided to target our demographic towards teenagers, as they may be able to empathise with the main character more.