Initial research

 Client brief and the purpose given to achieve:

Fruit Bowl Tech is a start up tech communications company operating from Milton Keynes (UK). Their  function is the production of mobile and desktop apps that allow business clients along with friends and family to share, explore and converse remotely as though they are together in the same room. Whilst they were originally aimed at the tech and business sector, they wish to appeal to families and friends. They wish to be perceived as friendly approachable and essential. They have a new product they are wishing to release; a mobile and web based app that allows global collaboration and communication, allowing for people to communicate with family members from anywhere, the app also can be used to discover new relatives and as a whole works as a modern, interactive family tree. Further, the app lets you create pages about alive or deceased family members, sharing images, documents and even stories. The documentation is made about you and relatives, the more connection can happen between you and long lost relatives. As well as all of this, the app allows a private chat function to further the connectivity between family members. 

Fruit Bowl has asked us to create a promotional video that further allows them to be perceived as "friendly approachable and essential", the content of this video has to have an interlinked visual style and narrative focus. They have asked us to create an overarching feel, visual style, more importantly convey the identity of the brand. The key messages that our promotional video should convey are the importance of family is just as great as the importance of friends, staying in contact is crucial, connecting with the past is just as important as connecting with the future. When watching the video, the audience ideally needs to think the app seems easy to use and want to reconnect with the past, feel sentimental, nostalgic and curious. Importantly, it needs to make the audience chose to download/sign up to the app.

Audience research

For this commission, the demographics we are looking to attract are ABC1 - 24 to 60 year olds that fit into the psychographics of explorers, mainstreamers and aspirers.

Demographics

UK demographic classifications allude to the social grade definitions used to show people of different social grade, income and earnings. These are used for a variety of things such as social commentary, market research and lifestyle statistics.

Due to the demographics we are appealing to are, ABC1 24 to 60 year olds, this means we will be looking to display the video on platforms that upper middle class, middle class and lower middle class that over 24 year olds predominantly use. To determine the best platforms, I conducted some research and a short two question survey distributed onto facebook, twitter and youtube answered by a total of 200 people. I only used two questions to make people less likely to skip by the survey

 questions and results:

Gender: female, male, other or rather not specify

Twitter: 84,101,9,6

Facebook: 80, 111,7,2

Youtube:60, 103, 29, 8

Age group: under 18, 18-24, 25-30, 31-49, 50-60 or 60 plus

Twitter: 52/200,35/200,39/200,45/200,22/200,7/200

Facebook: 11/200, 46/200, 54/200, 49/200, 28/200, 12/200

Youtube: 31/200,48/200,49/200,39/200,23/200,10/200

These results show that social media is mostly used by men over other genders, however a large amount of females still use social media along with smaller amounts of other genders, this allows the development of the video idea to be gender neutral as not only do all genders clearly use social media, but the app is not aimed at a specific gender. The results also show that the app that is used mostly by our demographic is Facebook followed by youtube. This helps provide us with an idea of which social media platforms would be best to advertise on to reach our target audience.

psychographics

In this brief, the targeted psychographics are explorers, mainstreamers and aspirers.

 Explorers wish to discover new things and often seek out challenges, their attention is most likely to be grabbed by, new, unique, innovative products and brands. This should make the explorers easier to appeal to as this will be the launch video for a new app, consisting of new ideas and allowing personal discoveries. A good way to appeal to explorers would be to make the app seem like an adventure, showing the discovery feature of the app in creative ways such as discovering ancestors and then actually meeting them would be a good approach, potentially exciting explorers, allowing them to want to see for themselves.

 The mainstreamers would be more difficult, yet entirely plausible, to appeal to as they search for less risks and find security in and value trusted apps that they know offer value for their money. A good way to reach the mainstreamers is to put emphasis on the family, possibly a stereotypical happy full family. This can help the mainstreamers feel familiarity and possibly build up trust for the app. Another good way to attract this group is through happy memories and nostalgia, possibly presenting a stereotypical happy moment in life being made better by the app such as a wedding. To ensure attraction from the mainstreamers, holding emphasis on the application being free would be seriously beneficial as they are not going to worry about wasting their money. 

Aspirers are often materialistic, looking for brands and products that showcase their societal status. It is important to aspirers to be fashionable, trendy and have a good public image. The best way to approach attracting aspirers would be to use familiar faces in the video such as higher end actors, possibly using trendy music. Also looking at using high end locations (for example, rather than a standard house, possibly a manor), making the video and in turn the app seem to be high end quality and therefore attracting people who are materialistic.

Competitors

Our two biggest competitors are ancestry and facebook. 

Ancestry is one of the biggest competitors because it offers similar functions such as finding information on living and deceased family, however, unlike ances-tree, it doesn't offer any for of function to get in contact with them. A way to surpass this competitor is to put emphasis on the chat function the product provides for its user and also emphasise that the app can create connection and help to bridge the gap between long lost family members through contact.

Facebook is also one of the biggest competitors because it also can be used to get in contact with family members and see what is going on in their life, however, ances-tree differs and can surpass this competitor because not only can you get in contact with family you haven't spoken to in a long time, it also offers functions to discover family you were unaware of as well as discover family that are deceased, allowing for creating a family future from the family past.