Psychographic research into audiences and genres

Psychographics relates to market research that's based on dividing people into groups based on their personalities, which is important when it comes to identifying and relating to specific target audience. Here are the categories:

Mainstreamers: go with the flow and replicate everyone else's attributes in society.

Aspirers - desires more out of life.

Succeeders - have money but don't need to show it.

Individualists - want to show they're different.

Carers - want to save the world.

These 5 categories help us to identify who we're targeting with our group's opening, while it also helps put into perspective how we're going to do this. For example, a carer would probably relate more to a nature documentary than a succeeder would, because they care more about that specific topic. In our case, because our film is about a man who defies social convention and wants to be someone of importance, it's clear our target audience is not just teenagers and young adults but more specifically 'aspirers.'


A media theorist, named Stuart Hall has 3 audience theories that strongly relate to Psychographics and they are as follows:

Preferred readings - when an audience can relate and empathise with the media text.

Negotiated readings - when an audience don not directly relate to the media text and have to place themselves into the world of the text.

Oppositional readings - when an audience and their life experiences have no relationship with the text and are actually resistant to it.

Looking at these theories, because our group is doing a drama, we knew we wanted it to be part of the 'preferred reading' category, with the naturalistic and gritty tone we're going for, reflecting these attributes. We also plan to incorporate verisimilitude by using very natural and common settings, such as a graveyard, so that there's less of a barrier between the film opening and the audience. With the audience empathising and possibly relating to our opening, it creates an emotional attachment so that the audience will then care about when and how the film concludes.