Audience Genre Certification

When deciding upon a certification for a film, you have to consider many things including: demographic groupings and cross cultural consumer characteristics, audience theories, genre and the thematic conventions running throughout your film.  It is important that a film has a certificate as some content may not be suitable for viewing by younger age groups.

Demographic Groups and Cross Cultural Consumer Characteristics

Demographic groups are, in effect, the gradings of the social status'.  Below is a table showing what categories the social classes are grouped into:

Social grade	Social status	Occupation
A	Upper middle class	Higher managerial, administrative or professional
B	Middle class	Intermediate managerial, administrative or professional
C1	Lower middle class	Supervisory or clerical, junior managerial, administrative or professional
C2	Skilled working class	Skilled manual workers
D	Working class	Semi and unskilled manual workers
E	Lowest level of substinence	State pensioners or widows (no other earner), casual or lowest grade workers

Cross Cultural Consumer Characteristics was devised by Young and Ribicam and is an alternative to demographic groups.  It is defined as "the effort to determine to what extent the consumers of two or more nations are similar or different. This will facilitate marketers to understand the psychological, social and cultural aspects of foreign consumers they wish to target, so as to design effective marketing strategies for each of the specific national markets involved."

Audience Theories

The hypodermic needle theory is when audiences don't need to pay that much attention - or engage their brain - to understand the film, the information is just fed to them. 

The uses and gratifications theory is when audiences want to feel something from a film.  These audiences will select a particular film because they want to learn something from it.