EVALUATION TASK 3By Alex Harris

WHAT IS A ‘FOCUS GROUP’? A focus group is the most grass-roots way you can

learn about your media business. By gathering a select group of regular people together, you can find out how your company is perceived versus your competition. The answers you get can be a road map as you build your brand.

ADVANTAGES AND DISADVANTAGES

The main advantages of focus groups are:

They are useful to obtain detailed information about personal and group feelings, perceptions and opinions.

They can save time and money compared to individual interviews.

They can provide a broader range of information.

They offer the opportunity to seek clarification.

They provide useful material eg quotes for public relations publication and presentations.

The main disadvantages of focus groups are:

There can be disagreements and irrelevant discussion which distract from the main focus

They can be hard to control and manage

They can to tricky to analyse They can be difficult to encourage

a range of people to participate Some participants may find a

focus group situation intimidating or off-putting; participants may feel under pressure to agree with the dominant view

As they are self-selecting, they may not be representative of non-users.

OUR FOCUS GROUP We had a focus group for our music video, which

we filmed and referred back to afterwards, analyzing the key points made. This enabled us to co-operate with the group whilst collecting data, giving them our full attention and listen to what they were saying, as well as communicating with them on the matter.

We wanted to find out if we had achieved our goal in creating a well rounded organic artists, and make successful products that our audiences could enjoy, understand, and relate to.

We also wanted to make sure that we had not over looked any mistakes or parts of our campaign that didn’t match eachother.

FEEDBACK-STRENGTHS Our feedback overall was a positive one. It seemed

as if the majority fully understood the genre and many mentioned the rebellious attitude looked good in a 1950s pastiche. This is positive as it is an example of Halls theory of the audience decoding the text the way we intended them to. The feedback also says that despite our band being indie rock and new, that the music video doesn’t look old fashioned and actually is a little humorous.

The majority also thought we had created a cohesive product as they could relate the black and white theme to each product created as well as easily identifying the bands genre and rebellious attitude.

FEEDBACK - WEAKNESSES Many participants commented on the same

issues. Many people said that during the music video, the lead singers head is cut off, the lighting is too bright so you cannot see the bands faces and that the frame size for the audience was wider than the band.

Below you will be able to view a video we made which explains that in fact all these were made on purpose to match the conventions of previous music videos similar to ours.