Pre-Production Market Research

Market research is ALWAYS important when making any film, particularly documentary as it's generally not fictional and a lot more thought is needed when deciding who is going to watch it and why.
Knowing the demographics, primarily age group, social class and gender can help a film-maker by understanding how a film needs to be presented; how it's edited, how the characters should be portrayed, and most importantly, what the documentary should be about.
E.g, a documentary that gives an insight into the 'Development of Renaissance Art' might not be as appealing to a teenager as a documentary that gives an insight into the 'Development of the iPod'. However, as stated the way in which a documentary is made also affects its success and effectiveness, so you could portray the renaissance documentary in a youthful, energetic light. Doing market research, knowing what people want to watch, lets film-makers make these decisions, that is why it's so vital. This started in the early 20th century when people in the advertising business started to realise that the demographics were very important after monitoring the sponsorship for different radio programs. For market research I would need to gather social research and opinion research, a questionnaire or survey. Market research is used in all sorts of industry, primarily businesses with advertising. When a film is made about a superhero for example, other film-makers can see how those films would score at the box office, and provides great feedback. If you know what a person wants to see, and you can capture it, then you know they'll be happy with what you produce. However this can be increasingly hard as not everyone has the same opinion and opinions can also change. Even so, without market research, the success of a film will be lucky. For my documentary in particular, before even doing research for my documentary, I need to do market research on the channel involved, in this case, BBC3. I need to find out how many people watch it, what kind of people watch it, and what kind of programs they would be interested in. Then I would have a more accurate idea of the kind of things that would get peoples' attention and get them to watch my program.