Page 126 - Living Room WarsDesprately Seeking the Audience Rethinking Media Audiences for a Postmodern World

Desperately seeking the audience 114
audience, is continuous research into questions, expectations and wishes
in the group it wants to reach of the utmost importance.
(VARA 1984:28–9)

Similarly, VARA’s current policy of ‘quality improvement’ explicitly foregrounds the
role of research in gauging the success of the policy (Van Dam 1987). The tendency to
rely on empirical information (rather than on normative knowledge stemming from a
preconceived ideology) to develop policy manifests itself more generally in repeated
reliance on a whole range of market research-type investigations: from repeated research
into VARA’s corporate image to smaller-scale pretesting of programme concepts and
pilots, which has become common practice within VARA in the late 1980s (VARA
1987). And so, when VARA fully realized that it had lost its ‘natural audience’, market
thinking finally became integrated within VARA practice.