Evaluation Question 3 - What have you learned from your feedback?

In order to recieve feedback for my music video and print productions, I chose to use a questionnaire. Of my thirteen respondees, eight were male, and all were between the ages 16 and 25. This allowed me to find out the opinions of my primary target audience. Although I was expecting different responses based on gender, I was surprised to find that it had no effect on the type of feedback. Instead I found that participants who frequently watched Rock music videos found it much easier to understand. In contrast to this, those who preferred other genres found the concept within the music video a little harder to understand. I believe that this is because they have been conditioned to expect something slightly different to what I delivered due to the themes and conventions of other genres having different effects.
A pattern I discovered in the questions answered was that questions which gave a set of answers to choose from achieved much more consistent answers. For uestions requiring a rating out of 5 I frequently recieved 3, 4 or 5, whereas open-ended questions often had very little substance to them. An example of this is the question "was there any part you found confusing or hard to understand?" I believe that this question is unfair on the participant as it asks them to explain something they may not necessarily want to take from the production. To counter this problem, it may be helpful to let participants look through the questions prior to the viewing, although this may lead to a very narrow interpretation of the video itself.
The feedback I recieved for my print productions was much more qualitative, asking indivuals if they would purchase my digipak based on the images and advertising they had seen. Feedback was generally positive, although some questionned the omnipresence of the character. Once I had explained to them the nature of his presence they understood it from a marketing perspective. Many of the participants in this stage of my feedback found that the magazine advert was their favourite. Reasons given for this include, "I like how he's looking out towards one side, it's like he want you to look at the album cover" and "it looks just like a real magazine advert." Of the two participants in this stage who had seen the original font I intended to use felt that the new font had a similar effect and may have actually been a better choice, although some of the other participants felt that the new font was too distracting.
The data I collected through my research and feedback sessions proved that my productions successfully targetted my target audience, although this may be due to myself also fitting into this target audience. As a member of the target audience, I was able to cater to my own requirements in hope of it also appealing to others. This is a direct reference to Kress' theory of the "ideal audience" and the notion of narcissism as, from a very narrow perspective, it can be said that I was the entire target audience.