MEDIA MOTIVATION BEHIND WATCHING POPULAR BOOK BASED MOVIES

MEDIA MOTIVATION BEHIND WATCHING POPULAR BOOK BASED MOVIES

This dissertation explores the one medium that the youth choose to get influenced by when it comes to watching popular fantasy book based movies. It is based on the assumption that the influencers may be many but ultimately the youth rely on one main medium to make their movie watching decision. The books which the movies are based on, advertising media and user generated word of mouth communication were considered as strong individual influencers. The researcher first aimed at finding out which medium motivated youngsters to watch the first fantasy book based movie of the series and consequently whether the same medium influenced the youngsters to watch the remaining movies in the series. The researcher went on further, to find out which advertising medium most motivated youngsters to watch the movie series irrespective of whether advertising proved to be the strongest influencer or not. The researcher chose the Harry Potter book based movie series, the Twilight book based movie series and the Lord of the Rings book based movie series and restricted the target audience to the age group of 18-25 years. 90 respondents were allotted questionnaires out of which 30 respondents each belonged to the Harry Potter, Twilight and Lord of the Rings category. They were further equally divided on the basis of gender to negate bias. The major conclusion was that user generated word of mouth communication proved to be the strongest influencer when it came to watching the chosen popular fantasy book based movies and brought about the importance of TV ads as the ones with the most potential when it came to influencing those respondents in the advertising category. However the researcher cautions the readers that these findings may be applicable to other popular fantasy book based movies only if they fall in the same category as the ones chosen for this research.

Robert Pereira Zuleika

Media Studies