James Bond stirs up supermarket DVD sales

It’s not quite up there with saving the world, but James Bond has helped three of the big four supermarkets increase their share of the entertainment market.

Supermarkets have accounted for a whopping 80% of the total DVD and Blu-ray sales of 007’s latest outing, Skyfall, after running aggressive pricing and advertising campaigns to push the February launch.

Their success has helped to increase the grocers’ share of the entertainment market (physical sales of videos, games and music and digital sales of music) to 32.2% in the first quarter of the year, up from 29.4% in the same period a year ago [Kantar Worldpanel 12w/e 17 March 2013].

“Skyfall was undoubtedly going to be the biggest title of the year and the grocers made sure they were the number-one choice for consumers”

Fiona Keenan, Kantar

“Skyfall was undoubtedly going to be the biggest title of the year and the grocers made sure they were the number-one choice for consumers,” said Kantar Worldpanel consumer insight director Fiona Keenan. “The supermarkets have had a really strong first quarter.”

Morrisons was the only big four supermarket to lose market share year-on-year, falling 0.7 points to 3%, with Tesco up 2.2 points to 12.2%, Sainsbury’s up 1.2 points to 6.5%, and Asda up 0.1 points to 10.5%.

The biggest riser was Amazon, which grew 2.9 points to 21.8%, although Kantar said the online giant was facing stiff competition in the video-games market from Game.

HMV lost 1.5 points of market share and fell to 17.6% -  a relatively strong performance that “will be good news for its new owners”, according to Kantar.

“There is still work to be done for HMV, particularly when we look at its decline over the past year and the growing dominance of its rivals,” added Keenan. “The growth of digital music has played an important part in its performance. Sales of digital music grew 12% in Q1 compared with the same period last year and now account for 47% of all music purchases. Amazon has been fast to react to this trend and HMV will need to act quickly to regain some of this market.”

Kantar’s breakdown of entertainment market share is below: