Focus On Batteries: 28 August

Focus On: Batteries by Megan Tatum (wordsbymegantatum@gmail.com)

Download the synopsis here

Publishing: 28 Aug 2021

Advertising deadline: 18 Aug 2021

Submissions deadline: 11 Aug 2021

The story

Supermarket sales of batteries have been electrified over the past year of intermittent lockdowns. Sales are up 6.2% to £318m with the number of batteries sold up 6%. According to analysis, this is primarily driven by existing shoppers putting more batteries in their baskets when they buy. So why are they doing this? Are they stockpiling? Are they using certain gadgets more because they’re stuck at home for more of the day? And which brands are buzzing and which have gone flat?

Key themes

How has lockdown impacted consumer behaviour? According to Kantar, increased time people spent at home drove an increased level of battery purchasing from households. With things slowly going back to normal, how will the coming year play out at the batteries fixture?

Promotions: Promotions are key to supercharging sales of batteries. There has been a 24% increase in spend on batteries bought on volume based promotions over the past year, with sales of alkaline batteries particularly reliant on this mechanic. This feature will explore how different brands and retailers have been approaching promotions over the past year and how this will evolve over the coming year.

Other market dynamics: This feature will explore in detail how different retailers and brands are approaching the category in terms of merchandising, ranging, pricing, promotions and marketing and how this is impacting sales performance

Innovation: A key focus of this feature will the latest trends in terms of product innovation. We will be profiling four interesting upcoming launches in a separate boxout – we require details about the product, its launch date, rsp and retail listings and high resolution (no less than 300dpi/1mb) product images.