Playing to Your Audience
Expectations and Delivery
- Social
- Published
Andrew Rodriguez
Any creative endeavor in which you have a desire for success and (presumably) the growth and continuation of said success requires several key things. But the first thing you must understand is that, whether you already know what it is, your creative project has a target demographic or baseline market. This customer base is your foundation—the potential customers who will be most likely to be predisposed to jumping in on your work—in our case, comic books.
Why is this important? Marketing your work properly is paramount to your success, as the most killer of ideas and top-tier presentation will invariably fall short if no one knows about it. Consider the following.
Playing From Behind
Many issues that we perceive in our entertainment today seem to stem from the comics, games, movies, etc., being marketed to an audience who is not interested in them while leaving the bread-and-butter customer base feeling ignored because these things are seemingly no longer being “made for them.”
Naturally, this is not a strong path to success, as you are turning off your existing customers while catering to an audience who, by default, is already not interested in your wares. You wouldn’t suggest a cozy romance novel to someone asking for a gritty crime thriller, nor would you recommend a horror story to a reader looking for lighthearted comedy. This can be applied universally across not just entertainment but any good or service on the whole. But our focus here is comic books, so let’s get down to brass tacks.
A Baseline Focus
Comic book fans come in all shapes, sizes, and tastes. It is already niche form of entertainment when compared with movies or video games, and just as with those mediums, each genre has a different base demographic in terms of what you have to pool from at the outset. This is key because the wise creator will measure their success based on how many people who should be interested in their thing actually buy the thing. The reason we do this is because, as stated, every genre has its base fans, and some of the genres are more “mainstream” or more niche than others.
This is compounded when you get into subgenres and can be further still depending on character and IP. An example of this could be DC Comics’ street-level vigilante heroes: Comics are the medium, street-level vigilantes the genre and archetype, and from there, we can further subdivide by characters such as Batman, Nightwing, Green Arrow, and so forth. When DC is making a Green Arrow book, they aren’t (and shouldn’t) expecting it to put up Batman numbers. What they should be doing is marketing it first and foremost to Green Arrow fans while also attempting to pull in new readers. But the key here is focusing first on your base, as they are your highest likelihood of success.
Giving Your Project a Leg Up
Success is never guaranteed in any creative endeavor. It takes a lot of luck, but proper marketing can tip those odds in your favor. Let’s say you want to create a character who is a bit more of a classic superhero—lighthearted, genuinely good-natured, and lacking in edginess and pseudo-anti-heroism. When telling your desired audience about this project, you want to make clear your intentions, as that audience will have clear expectations if it is indeed the sort of character they want to see and are willing to pay for.
You want to find that audience who loves characters of similar disposition and qualities, those who fans enjoy for the fun and sense of hope they instill. You can further widen your potential reach by marketing it as something that is safe for a younger audience as well, as since you’re not creating a darker and more violent character, you can quite easily entice parents to dive into your project for their pre-teens and teens without fear of them being exposed to something they’d rather them not be.
Delivering on Expectations – Following Through
You’ve created your character and told your desired audience what they should expect from the project. You marketed your project such that your intentions were clear to give yourself and your work the best chance of success in the genre you’re playing in.
Now comes the ultimate question:
- Did you follow through?
- Did you promise your customers a fun-loving, hope-inspiring hero and deliver on precisely that?
- Did you bait-and-switch your audience and instead present them with the veneer of that light-hearted character while giving them a brutal, dark, edgy anti-hero?
If these questions sound rhetorical or remedial, then you likely understand customer expectations and target markets within creative fields. If this question leaves you pondering, then consider how much care you put into your work and how much you feel it ought to soar to great heights.
Don’t shoot yourself and your project in the foot by marketing to the wrong audience! Give yourself the best odds by playing to the demographic who will be most interested in your work, and then follow through on your promises so that you, too, can be GREAT!
