Audience Targeting in Sci-Fi Movies

Mainstream vs Niche: 

Mainstream- The main body of all movie audience; the 'majority' or the '99%'. There are some sci-fi films that target this audience and use various techniques in their advertising, themes and cinematic structure to achieve this. For example Hollywood films tend to be very mainstream as they have such large budgets they need to appeal to a lot of people to make the money spent on production and advertising budget back.

Niche- Niche movies tend to target specific and deep interests and often explore more unusual or thought provoking themes. While most sci-fi films are mainstream they did begin as niche movies and therefore some directors and producers, particularly those with a lower budget, will opt for the more niche directorial choices. Evidently niche movies have much lower budgets and this is what allows them to create these more niche movies; they don't have the factor of making to much money to worry about.

Segmentation:

Segmentation is the idea of breaking target audiences up into groups or 'segments' using ideas such as demographics or psychographics.

Demographics- Demographics are one means of segmentation which uses factual information to categorise many different fields that are relevant to the characteristics of an audience into one group, for example fields such as Age, Gender, Occupation and Class may all be grouped into one demographic

Psychographics- Psychographics deal less with factual information and focus instead on the attitudes and values of an audience such as 'survivors' that are interested in security and routine or 'social climbers' who are interested in material wealth and status symbols.

Sci-Fi Target Audience Profile:

A science fiction fan will typically have a certain set of interests and ideas that make them relatively simple to target. While a relatively untrue stereotype in the modern day, most would expect a sci-fi fan to be interested in and this usually fits the 'geek' or 'nerd' persona. This means that the age of the target audience will tend to be lower as this is a stereotype most people grow out of. These are also usually caucasian white males in the western world such as Europe or North America. These people are also usually of a middle to upper class background and slightly more intelligent. Additionally, these people fit the psychographics of 'Social Climbers' or 'Explorers' as they are usually interested in finding new concepts and discovering more and more new franchises to fit their interests. Resultantly sci-fi advertising and design can be analysed and should reflect these descriptions. Despite this it should be noted that there are a lot of people that fall outside of this demographic and psychographic and a lot of sci-fi films are also made to target other audiences.

Uses & Gratifications (U&G):

This theory tries to explain the reasons people use a media text and divides this into 4 sections. Entertainment and diversion suggest that people use these films as a diversion and escapism from real life. Surveillance and Information suggest that people use these films to find out new ideas and concepts and further their knowledge through cinema. Personal Identity shows people to want to relate to a character as they are similar in characteristics with the character. Finally personal companionship is the idea of people wanting to build companionship with characters and feel for what happens to them (hence the case on soaps).