This part of the individual task I personally find extremely difficult, firstly because I still haven’t completed my cabinet and there are A LOT of things missing from it (hopefully, it will be ready very soon), and secondly because I find it hard to presume the target audience of a movie or a book, based on social class, rather than age, gender, nationality, etc. Out of all my items, I have picked some to comment on (some of them aren’t even on the blog yet) and to analyse their target social class.
First of all, from my articles category, it is easily noticeable that my main source is http://news.bbc.co.uk, so instead of trying to analyse the target audience of a specific article, I’m going to sum it up for the website. I am not too familiar with the whole content of the website and the kind of news they have, thus allowing me to analyse it into a much deeper sense. However, I think since you need to have a computer and internet access (not necessarily at home) and sufficient skills to go on the internet and look at the news, I would presume it targets social classes B, C1 and C2. After doing some research, I found out that AB classes are more likely to buy a newspaper, rather than sit at home and go online to view the news, and I would guess that unskilled workers, pensioners, etc also prefer reading a newspaper and probably don’t have the ability or the capability to go on the internet to follow the news.
From my books category, at the moment I have two children’s books (The Little Prince and The Little Mermaid), which are actually not so oriented at children, as at adults (so much for the target age group). When it comes to social class, though, a book is generally a product that needs to be bought, so I would leave out categories D and E again, probably there are even people from these groups that can’t read and thus are unskilled manual workers. I would be most likely to assign classes A and B to those books; presumably those are the classes that are most interested in spending their money on books, whether for themselves or their children. And since these are two really known authors that have been around for a long time and I wouldn’t exactly categorize their products as mass culture, and that would apply to a higher-cultured group – basically ABs.
From my commercials category, I have picked a Swatch commercial (since it is not on the blog yet, the video is below). Swatch is a Swiss brand for wrist watches and their products range from really expensive (like Omega products, that take the 5th place among the most expensive watch brands ever, after Rolex, Cartier, Patek Philippe and TAG Heuer) to some actually affordable ones, ranging from $30-50 per piece. That would most probably put their production into the ABC1 group of consumers – people who would consider spending $100 for instance on a watch, whilst C2DE most probably would buy a cheap watch that will break after some time, but it will not be money spent in vain.
From the music, I have picked a Coldplay video (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IakDItZ7f7Q). The CD from this album, which is 2008’s Viva la Vida album, sells for under $12, basically affordable by everyone. Although, if I am to analyse the probable target audience, I wouldn’t put ABs or Es into that category, mostly because I guess the upper middle class would be more interested in the Financial Times, magazines and TV programs, rather than buying music CDs, and when it comes to the lower working class, I wouldn’t presume they would have the time to consume as much music products, as I believe the C1C2Ds will.
From my movies group, I would analyse a British production, starring my very favourite Ryan Philippe. The movie is called Franklyn (http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0893402) and the story is about two parallel worlds – one of them is contemporary London, whereas the other one, Meanwhile city, is a city based on religion and politics, where a guy called Preest (basically Priest) is going on a quest to kill the “Individual”. The movie is not that complicated, when it comes to the story, but looking at it as to content, I guess it won’t be very interesting for people who are not interested in politics and religion and how they control and manipulate society and kill the individual. So, I would definitely put the target audience into the ABs, because in my opinion they are those mostly interested in the film’s message.
When it comes to the short films, I picked a Bulgarian short film student’s production called the Air Ace. Short films are mainly not targeting big audiences, unlike feature films, and they are probably consumed by a lot smaller group of people. And especially since this is a university project, perhaps not really aimed at profit and not really produced for that reason, and it is also not really mass culture, given that it is a Bulgarian, unknown small production, I would probably assign it to target audience in the range of B, C1, C2 and D. Why I would do this is because it is not really aimed at the mass audience and thus I’m leaving out E category of social class, and I’m unsure as to whether upper middle class would be interested in spending time on an unknown short film production, rather than on shopping, for instance.
An item from the TV shows would be a British production called “The IT crowd” (http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0487831), which is basically the story of two computer geeks and their supervisor, who is a woman that has no knowledge of computers whatsoever. It is rather difficult for me to assign a social class to that show, rather than analyse the target age group, for instance. However, there is some difficult language and a lot of computer terms, I find myself looking up words from time to time. So, a social class with sufficient computer knowledge and a high level of English, probably ABC1s in that case.
From videos, I will pick the online show “quarterlife”, as it doesn’t really fall into the “TV show” category, given that it was not produced for television (http://quarterlife.com/theshow/view - quarterlife). It is a production, oriented at the 20-30-year-olds, experiencing life drama, and also aiming at internet users (which fall exactly into that age group). It is not a big TV production, it doesn’t aim at A and B social classes, it is rather produced for a bigger audience, but not really as mass culture – a bigger audience meaning that internet access reaches more people than TV sets probably do. Based on the age target group, which is the 20-30-year-olds, I don’t suppose they fall into the ABs or DEs, so again this leaves me at the C1 and C2 social class grades, which this production aims at.
And last but not least, a website category and my favourite piece – Facebook. I did comment on a news website, but it was related to articles and not really websites. Facebook is the biggest social network that exists at the moment, much bigger than MySpace or Twitter. It is generally oriented again at 20-30-year-olds, although there are much older people using Facebook to connect with old time friends. Since it is again online and it requires at least a little bit of knowledge, I would exclude group E, and the upper middle class grade A would probably not be hanging out in Facebook, rather than doing something else. But I’m going to leave it at that and include 4 social class grades – B, C1, C2 and D, because this network is so vast and open, that I would presume it aims at as many people as possible.
Overall, I can see that it is really difficult to study target audience based on social class, given that I don’t even have a vast enough understanding of exactly the line between social classes and what exactly differs them from one another and helps producers shape content, based on that. I don’t really have a deep enough knowledge into media and audience research, so these are my first attempts into target consumption study and any feedback would be really helpful!
