Audience Research - Demographics: Class & Gender

The new model of defining class in the UK gives 7 separate classes; Elite, Established Middle, Technical Middle, New Affluent Workers, Emergent Service Workers, Traditional Working, and Precariat. This gives us new criteria for targeting our audience that we must consider.

A general overview of thriller targeting based on class is as follows:

Upper class - Arthouse, high budget mainstream, noir, drama-based
Middle class - Mainstream, both action and drama based (a majority of films are aimed at the middle classes due to their excess time and money)
Lower class - Action based, social realist, crime based

We had intended our film to be crime based, drama based, and fairly mainstream, partly to serve our narrative and partly due to our limitations in budget and equipment. This complicates our targeting in terms of class, even if we go by the traditional (somewhat antiquated) system. The seven class system complicates matters yet further.

Information regarding the class makeup of cinema goers and film consumers is difficult to find, making it quite difficult for us to target the film based on secondary research. In my opinion, our film ought to be targeted between the Established Middle and New Affluent Worker classes (just under half the population), however a final decision on this will come following discussion with the other students and primary research.

Gender:

Traditionally, the thriller and crime genres tend to be targeted at a predominantly male audience, however despite this I feel that all genres can be met with approval from all genders.

This chart indicates the ratings of the same four films that I looked at in age, but arranged by gender. As is evident, within each film the ratings are extremely close between the genders making gender in terms of targeting less of an issue for us than factors such as age or class. Particularly interesting is that the two films that are, in my opinion, most alike to ours in narrative and style, Hummingbird and Welcome To The Punch, have an gender equal rating and a more favourable rating from women respectively. This is likely to be down in some part to the casting of Jason Statham and James McAvoy, however it remains indicative of the increasingly small gap between genders when it comes to the consumption of crime thriller films.

CM