Demographic research and planning

A core factor to planning and creating a Soap marketing campaign is knowing who to target your product to and why - your core demographic.
While we were planning, there were many different ideas to cater to multiple demographics, such as a simple Soap to target the normal audience such as EastEnders, which is watched predominantly by women ranging by age from an average of 16, to around 40 years. However, Soaps like EastEnders are of such a high profile that anything that could be considered taboo, or simply a bit of insensitive writing could lead to a massive controversy, and therefore they need to be very careful in what issues they write about in their show.
We decided that our Soap would want to deal with controversial and contemporary issues like youth drug addictions, whilst also catering to other factors like trying to get the girl. Therefore, we decided our demographic audience should be similar to that of teen Soap Hollyoaks, as they have a demographic of around 14 - 24 year old audiences from each gender.
This type of audience was, in my opinion, easier to write engaging stories for to put in our Soap trailer, as primarily, as I, and my team are from that age group, we would understand the issues that affect teens' daily lives more than we would understand daily issues for adults, such as bills. In addition to this, the cast to Hollyoaks is comprised mainly of younger people, as opposed to EastEnders or Coronation Street, as the young cast members in Hollyoaks allow the viewers to relate to their problems, as they will also be of a similar age.

The Hollyoaks cast

Therefore, this also allowed us to plan our filming much more efficiently, as we didn't need to plan our times to allow for multiple adults to make it to the filming. Instead, by having us and a few friends appear as the main cast, we were able to complete our filming within our set time.
Having our demographic similar to Hollyoak's was also good for our planning, as BBC One does not have a Soap to cater to the teen demographic, and so it also makes sense to have our Soap hosted on BBC. The demographic also allowed us to plan much faster also, because, as mentioned, many of the factors that affect the lives of the characters will have also affected us at some point, and so we would be able to apply our experience to the writing, thus making it much more believable.