Focus Group Evaluation

Hello!

Here is the evaluation of our Focus Group. Here you can see what we learnt from our interview!

What we have learnt from our focus group task:

We asked a group of girls aged 16, 17 and 18 what they thought of three specific music videos that we are focusing our documentary and main task on. We asked this group of females in that age category as they are our main target audience for our music video, therefore their views would match those closely of the people we are aiming to attract. They watched the video ‘Rude boi’ by Rihanna, ‘I wanna dance with somebody’ by Whitney Houston, and ‘Single ladies’ by Beyoncé.

We picked these three videos out of all of the possible female pop artist’s music videos as they all have a lot of differences that we wanted the focus group to pick out on. Rihanna’s music video is a recent song that is quite explicit and features a lot of bold colours, Beyoncé’s music video is also recent but is in black and white and focuses on different aspects such as dancing. Whitney Houston’s music video is a lot older than the other two videos therefore focus on different things and shows them in a different way.

After watching Rihanna’s music video, the feedback from the focus group consisted of comments about how she wasn’t wearing a lot, but how this worked as the lyrics linked into the images displayed. They also said that the colours drew attention from the audience as it became eye catching and interesting. They said that Rihanna’s music video would attract females as it’s a catchy pop song, but also that males would be interested because of the setting and costume choice.

After watching Whitney Houston’s music video the group talked about how there was a difference in the two videos they had watched so far. Whitney’s focused more on her face and the lyrics that were being presented, as well as having other dancers. The song was shown to mean more to them than just the catchiness of Rihanna’s video. They said that even though it was an older video, it was still catchy and they would enjoy both of those videos.

They were then shown Beyoncé’s music video. This was in black and white the whole way through, so differed from the other videos in that aspect, but the focus group said that it worked with the lyrics and performance. They said that a video without colours wouldn’t have worked for Rihanna’s video, but Beyoncé had made it work as she had focused on other things like the skill of dancing. Beyoncé’s video was very minimalistic, with a plain background and just the dancers in the centre. The focus group talked about how although this was different, it didn’t seem like anything was missing as the dancing and lyrics were enough.

From this task, we have learnt that in order to attract our target audience, we should alter our ideas of the video to fit the lyrics given across and the general feel of the song. The majority opinion from our focus group was that they found Rihanna’s video more entertaining- therefore using bright colours may attract the attention of our target audience easier.

More audience research is to come including an online survey!

See you soon!