Evaluation: Question 3

What have you learned from your audience feedback?

I believe audience feedback is the quintessential part of making a product because not only does it provide constructive criticism, it also allows the creators to get praise for all their hard work. This is also applicable to the wider music industry because one of their primary goals is to essentially make income and to do that, they need to know what their target audiences like or dislike. Understanding the psychology of their subjects is a key aspect of making a successful product and can be abused as mentioned by the mass society theory. However the Users Gratification Theory suggests that consumers are active and have power over what media they consume. This is reflected and the is the purpose of audience feedback so that larger companies have to cater to people's needs.Audience feedback is also important to the media/music industries because they provide a different perspective and can provide insight on your product that someone who works on the product wouldn't be able to provide. Also artists tend to be biased towards their ideas therefore outside opinions are essential in critiquing the product. Without audience feedback, music companies take a huge risk that will likely end in failure.

Audience feedback is mainly used to improve and provide information about a product through the eyes of a consumer. Based on what audiences say, the music/media industry will make changes to their product that will compliment the feedback. For example, if you were trying to make a new brand of sweets and the consensus of the audience feedback was that you should add more artificial flavours then you should make changes to your sweets that reflect it.

Ignoring audience feedback is a gamble because you're essentially disregarding the demands of your audience and relying on your own intuition and expertise. Most cases of ignoring audience feedback don't end successfully because they don't have an outside opinion to criticize their product however they do attract alot of attention that may or may not be helpful. The consequences are an unsuccessful product, loss in income, damage to your brand and public humiliation.

For us, audience feedback was very useful for optimizing our music video, magazine adverts, CD covers and inserts. The criticism that we got from our mid-production magazine advert feedback such as we should focus on improving editing, colour scheme and font really made a significant difference in our final products.

Compare how our magazine advert previously looked without audience feedback, to how it is now:



As you can see, the criticism we got for our magazine adverts drastically helped us to focus on improving our products. Whilst we were aware that we had weaker elements to our products, we weren't sure which area we needed to focus on. Therefore audience feedback aided us in focusing on specific areas which improved out final product. However we did not agree that font was a huge issue for this specific magazine advert because it was that we didn't have much writing on the magazine advert rather than the font itself being a problem.

For positive feedback, I wasn't necessarily surprised because from the first audience feedback for our print work, our audience were clearly active over what they felt was relevant in today's society, linking to the Users Gratification Theory. 60% of people felt that magazine ads were not relevant in today's society which clearly shows that our consumers are not passive, complying with the theory that consumers have power over what media they consume. Generally I'd say that the positive feedback was incredibly helpful for providing us encouragement that what we were doing was good and helped us perpetuate our success.