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.