The purpose of research...

Grading:

So, why do we carry out research? What is the point?

Lets start by thinking about the influence the media has in society.......

We want to know if our target audience is going to respond to, buy into, consume our product.

So, what effect can our product have? What effect does the media have?



If we know our audience, we know what they want or we can help them to know what they want.

Does the public get what the public wants? Or does the public want what the public gets?

You will cover many apects of this unit when you are carrying out research for your other units and you must evidence that in Unit 1, either by providing physical copy, or by creating a hyperlink to the relevant research.

Market Research...
When you are creating a product, opening a restaurant, selling a new brand of mobile phone, you must assess the market that you are about to enter. If you are going to open a new Chinese restaurant in your town, you need to know....

• How many people will have access to it?
• How many of you audience will be aware of the restaurant, just from passing by?
• Where are people likely to travel form to eat in your town?
• What type of people live in or just eat in the area? What is their dispendable income? Do they have a diserning pallete? Will the family be coming to eat? Is the population made up of young people, in groups or couples?
• How often to people eat out in the area? What leisure time to people have? Is it a business area where people eat out for lunch rather than dinner?
• Will people welcome a new restaurant in the area? Are they already fed up of too many busy businesses on that street? Are people in the area open to the idea of new, forward thinking places, with unusual interior and an exotic menu? Are people just happy with the a good old fashioned style?
• What other restaurants or takeaways are there in the area? What do they serve? How do they serve?
• Where will be the best places to advertise your business? Are there any bars or pubs near by?
  
• How have other new businesses advertised and what effect has it had on their business? Special offers? Vouchers to collect in the local paper for a free meal? A radio advertisement???????????

All of the above statements are specific forms of market research but what are they?

Try and match the sentences above, with the terms below...

Advertising effects, competitor analysis, advertising placement,

consumer behaviour, consumer attitudes, audience data,

audience awareness, audience profiling, product reach.

You are setting up a new radio station in the area but you need to do some research. I think you can guess what you need to do. Use the headings to structure your research but think inventively about how you present it.

You must also research how you plan to set up the project.....


Setting up.....

What about the costs of setting up this station? How many staff will you need? What equipment will you need?

These are all questions that you need to research...

Content
What kind of programmes should you broadcast?
What type of music should you play?

Resources
Who will you need to help you run the station?
What skills will they need to have?
How much will you need to pay them?

What equipment will you need?
Where can you broadcast from?

Costs
How much will the equipment cost?
The streaming?
The licences?

Viability?
How realistic are your plans?
How could you scale down the project?

Placement
Do you broadcast for a period of time?
Stream online?
Make podcasts available for download?

Audience
How will your audience want to access your product?

Competitors
How are your competitors delivering their product and in what form?

You are a media student.....think audio and visual interviews, blogs, recording phone calls, screen shots etc......

Remember, if you have examples of this research elsewhere, reference it and just fill in the gaps, with the new research.

How you carry out this research and the methods you use are outlined in the next blog, followed by different techniques for presenting your findings........