All About the Audience: Aesthetic and Interpretive Qualities

PART 1: THE AUDIENCE

Hello to my fellow creatives. Let me ask you a question. Why do you create? I surely can't answer for you but my purpose for creating and producing is for people to enjoy and appreciate. No matter what the project is my motivation is that somewhere in the world what I'm creating will make someone smile, laugh or shake their head and wonder "how the hell did they do that?" If you are also motivated by this, I hope you find this blog useful because today we will be discussing a range of steps vital to delivering your work to your desired audience and ensuring it's received an interacted with the way it was intended.

Firstly, we have to determine the intended audience of the project we are working on. As an example, lI'm going to use a band named Lippia that I'm currently producing an EP for and walk you through the process I used to determine this for myself.

Let's start with a little video just to clarify what we are talking about when we use the term 'audience'. This video was created with a focus on marketing but if anything i think that's what makes it MORE relevant. Regardless though, try and think about the messages conveyed in relation to your discipline - witch if you're on my blog, I'm guessing is audio.

So how do I determine my audience? Well I need to put considerable though and research into "individual customers who have expressed a specific interest that aligns with my message and are therefore likely to engage".

To do this let's start with a little background information about Lippia and you'll already begin to see the target audience.

1. Rock / Punk Band

2. Young

3. Plays live often

This is how I determined my audience. By identifying the key characteristics of the band and simply asking yourself what we learnt in the video above - who has already expressed interest in similar projects and who are most likely to engage with my project? I find this approach extremely helpful because it prevents you from falling into the trap of trying to win over new audiences accidentally - your best bet is to spend your time and resources targeting your project at people who you know will appreciate it as opposed to people who might utterly resent it.

So who are my target audience? Well as result of the above thought process I have determined that my audience for the Lippia EP Project exists within people who:

1. Already claim to enjoy Rock/Punk music

2. People who are aged 18 -25

3. People who enjoy live music

PART 2: DESIRED REACTION

So what do we do after we've identified our target audience? Well the next important thing to discuss is how we want the identified audience to react, interact and interpret the project. To elaborate, how do we want people to feel and what do we want people to do?

If I identify how I want people to react, interact and interpret the project, I can determine what emotions would make them feel this way and consequently what process and aesthetics I can use to set the whole chain into action.

There are three main ways I would like the audience of the project to react, or more so, interact.

1. Enjoy and appreciate the project

2. Share the project

3. Seek more material from both the band and myself in the future

If these three desired reactions are fulfilled the project will have been a success. Firstly, if people enjoy the project, it satisfies the inner reason why we create. Secondly, if people are sharing the project it has a chance of reaching more people within our target audience and also people outside of our target audience in an indirect way which required little effort or resources on our end. And finally, we want the audience to look for our work in the future - both from the band and myself separately.

PART 3: APPROACH

Now it all comes down to the plan. What approaches am I going to implement to ensure that the aesthetic choices I make thought the course of this project appeal to the identified audience and deliver the three main objectives? Let's have a look.

1. As outlined above, the first desired response to the project is that the audience enjoys and appreciates the project. This objective is probably the most straight forward to satisfy because if the project is a success and I've done my job to the best of my ability, the project should already be enjoyable and appreciable. However, it's best to not rely on that and instead take the precaution of outlining what aesthetics need to be implemented to ensure that the project is enjoyable for the target audience. For our target audience (people 18-25, who identify as fans of rock/punk, who enjoy live music) to enjoy and appreciate the project it needs to possess aesthetics which translate as true to the genre, bold, energetic, honest and genuine. Respectively, I believe these can be portrayed through techniques and processes such as; keeping the focus on the instruments, punchy guitars, making sure there's some life and top end in the track, keeping the creative processing at a minimal and transparency in who the band are without any effort to change them.

2. The second desired response was for the audience to share the finished product on social media to increase the number of people the project reaches - hopefully drawing in any individuals who fit into our target audience but weren't exposed to the project first-hand. So what aesthetic choices would encourage someone to share the project online? Well to achieve this aspect we need to promote aesthetics that translate as; professional, overwhelmingly impressive, friendly and new/unknown. These thoughts and feeling that we are aiming to convey are again predominantly byproducts of myself an the band doing good job. However, I feel that we can guarantee these outcomes if we adhere to implementing the following processes; present all aspects of the project (songs, graphic design, social media presence) to the public in a highly professional and industry standard manner, find a reference who is 'overwhelmingly impressive' and develop all aspects of the project to reach a similar level, ensure that all social media updates and interactions are friendly and portray the band as approachable and deserving of recognition as well as deliberately marketing the band as 'new and unknown'.

3. Finally, the last reaction that would make this project a success is for the audience to look for, or look forward to, more work from the band and myself after we go our separate ways. This is the final goal of the project because we want to start creating fanbases with a sense of loyalty who are always interested in seeing and engaging in whatever we are working on or anything that we release. In order to get this reaction there are few things things we need to convey through our project and its execution. Some of these include; a reputation for quality, incentive to come back, a sense of loyalty. These can be achieved by putting specific focus on delivering a product that compares and exceeds others on the market and treating the audience with kindness, appreciation and gratefulness.

I hope you found this an interesting read. Talking through it definitely helped me work out some of the details and really understand the goals of the project further.

Until next time,

Brandon Hayward