Digipack- focus group

First Meeting

During the planning process of making my digipack, I organized a focus group as part of my research in an attempt to gauge an idea of public opinion towards mainstream album covers. I tried as best I could to have my focus group made up of the target audience for the album i.e. teenagers. In total 20 people attended my focus group.

The focus group was presented in the form of a questionnaire consisting of 5 questions and an opportunity for them to voice feedback. The 5 questions were as follows:-

1. Should an album cover focus on the artist or relate to the lyrics of the songs in the album?

2. If models are to be used on the album cover, would it be more appropriate for them to be male or female?

3. What is more important on an album cover; the image or the text?

4. Are you generally more attracted by colourful album covers or more subtly sinister (mysterious looking) album covers?

5. Would you say simple or more complex album covers are more effective?

The questionnaire returned some quite conclusive results as follows:-

-There was an almost 50% split in the first question with 11 of the 20 participants believing an album cover should focus on the artist rather than the lyrics in their songs. However many of the 9 others recognised the importance of promoting the artist given that this was her first single released as a solo artist.

-Question 2 was far more conclusive and supported the suggestions made from Question 1 with 17 of the 20 participants agreeing that if models were to be used on the album cover they should be female and ideally the artist herself in order to promote and rebrand herself as a solo artist.

-There was further conclusive results in Question 3 with 15 of the 20 participants believing the image is far more important than the text on an album cover because it is the main factor which grasps the attention of the buyer/customer.

-Question 4 was delicately split at with 10 participants believing a colourful cover was most important and the other 10 suggesting a sinister/mysterious cover would be more enticing to a potential buyer. For this question the feedback was far more intuitive than the results with almost all participants in agreement that the design of the cover is more important than the colours on it etc.

-For Question 5, 14 of the 20 participants believed a simpler design is usually more appropriate on album covers and that busy, complex designs often put them CD's.

Second Meeting

After gathering the information from the first meeting I had a basis for designing the album cover and a set of loose guidelines for designing my album cover as follows:-

-The artist should feature on the cover for promotional reasons.

-The cover design should be kept fairly simple.

-An image of the artist should be prominent on the cover with the text taking a secondary priority.

With these guidelines in mind I took several photo's of the artist in a photo shoot, I then narrowed them down to just three photo's and organized my focus group to reconvene for a second meeting.

In this second meeting I wanted to gauge a publicly opinion more specifically on these three photo's. I asked each member of the focus group to put the photo's in order of preference. I then also asked them to put down two reasons from a list of four, what they liked about each photo. The options and photo's were as follows:

Options

-Lighting

-Pose

-Use of Effects

-Setting

Photo's

1.

2.

3.

Results:

The results from the focus group showed that 14 of the 20 people questioned believed photo 2 was the most appropriate for the album cover. The vast majority of the 20 people cited setting and use of effects as the reason the photo appealed to them.