You’re super excited. You’re a junior marketing manager at a big movie studio and you’ve just landed your first major account. You’ve been asked to work on the promotion of their latest film, a big-budget action flick headlined by an up-and-coming star. The studio has already invested millions and wants to know if audiences will buy the actor in the role. It’s your job to test the unreleased film on the target audience and see how they react.
In this instance, getting the target market right could mean the difference between a blockbuster for the studio or the loss of hundreds of millions of dollars. It could mean a promotion for you, or consignment to a junior role forever. How do you not mess this up? First, you need to pull together a few movie focus groups, but even before that, you need to decide who is your target market. Your target market is the group of people who are most likely to buy a ticket to come to see this movie.
Figuring out who the target is and understanding what makes them tick will save you time and money. You won’t waste time targeting huge groups of people, many of whom may prefer rom-com or sci-fi movies. You won’t waste money creating tailored marketing messaging for people who wouldn’t want to see an action movie anyway. Let’s break down how you go about this.
Market Research
Research, of course, is key. What we’re about to embark upon here is a strategic market research project. Strategic research is something you’ll be doing for the lifetime of your product or service, in this case, a movie studio making action movies for an audience. The reason becomes clear when you consider how different action movies from the 80s are to today.
Tastes change. Audience profiles change. Strategic market research helps you stay current with what the audience wants in a very general sense. Remember, this is a star not known as an “action hero”, and you are trying to see if people are going to buy him as your leading man. General information when putting your movie focus groups together won’t be enough and will likely make your research results inaccurate. You’ll want to get some specifics. You’ll have to drill down.
Identification and Segmentation
Once you have a broad sense of who your target market is, you’ll need to segment it or break it down into smaller categories. You’ll need to know who your specific demographic is. This is a physical breakdown of your target market, that is, age, sex, race to name a few criteria.
It’s not the only criteria you can segment by. Another is the audience’s psychographics. These are the intangible motivations that cause them to buy a ticket to see this movie. Do they think action movies are cool and watching them makes them cool by proxy?
- Your audience can also be split by its behavioral characteristics. When are they most likely to buy an action movie ticket?
- Geographic segmentation is another way your audience can be separated? Where are they from?
From here, you can begin to source the people who ideally fit your target market for this movie and begin having your focus group screenings of this movie.
Getting the Focus Group Together
If your budget allows, you can, of course, hire a market research firm to help you out here. It’s likely they already have a portfolio of people who fit your profile. But there are lots of other places you can look for action movie buffs too. Your movie studio has a social media page full of fans (and critics) reacting to its offerings. You can start there.
Online forums, social media groups, and the comments section of these can be a rich source of screening attendees. If there is a college campus nearby, students are only too happy to supplement their limited income.
Sometimes, you can even have this traffic driven to you. Stan’s Gigs is a site that lets people know your focus group is happening and gives them the opportunity to sign up to participate.
With this wide pool of prospects, you can begin to narrow down further who attends your screenings. You can ensure that you get the most accurate research result, the right people give you feedback, the marketing material is correctly tailored…and the movie is a hit.
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