Brand owners including Unilever, SCA Hygiene and Northern Foods are backing a new scheme which targets people with samples and promotional offers when they move into their new home.
The Home Moving Box involves a cardboard box sponsored and co-branded by Scottish and Southern Electricity and Moveme.com, the home-moving website.
Filled with FMCG products suited to the upheaval of a new home, it will be couriered direct to the doorsteps of 200,000 new homeowners, mainly in the ABC demographic, over the next 12 months.
The scheme was conceived by ideas consultancy Lucid Thinking which, to date, has received over £1 million in investment.
Its chief executive, David Pickles, said: “The Home Moving Box is a unique opportunity for brands to engage with customers when they are susceptible to changing purchasing habits and their daily routine. For the consumer, it provides really useful products and information to make the moving day run smoother.”
The box, which is sized 480mm x 270mm x 270mm, is branded with The Home Moving Box, Scottish and Southern Energy and Moveme.com logos. Rather than just samples, the box predominantly contains full-sized products. The first boxes will contain:

• An energy-saving light bulb provided by Scottish and Southern Energy
  
• A twin-pack of Bounty kitchen roll from SCA Hygiene
  
• A four-pack of Quilted Velvet from SCA Hygiene
  
• A 250g pack of Billington’s Golden Granulated sugar
  
• A packet of Fox’s premium biscuits from the Indulgent range, from Northern Foods
  
• A one-litre bottle of Candia UHT milk
  
• A sample pack of Cif multipurpose cleaner from Unilever.

It will also contain a Scottish and Southern brochure and money-off voucher and a mail order catalogue from furniture and accessories retailer Oka. Each of the brands involved is including a discount offer in the box, enabling them to measure the response to their inclusion in the initiative.
Chris Bartlett, SCA Hygiene’s marketing director, said: “We’re excited to be part of this new sampling opportunity and look forward to seeing the results. We see The Home Moving Box as a great opportunity to target consumers at a moment in their lives when their purchasing patterns change.”
The partnership with Moveme.com means that all consumers who use the online house-moving service and provide their new address will be sent The Home Moving Box. Once it has been couriered, Moveme.com will follow up its service with a questionnaire which will provide participating brands with feedback.
Moveme.com has also signed a deal with AOL and MSN to provide their UK sites with its move-planning platform. As a result of the partnership, The Home Moving Box will also be offered to consumers who use the service via AOL and MSN.
The first wave of 50,000 boxes is being delivered to homeowners between April and mid-August. Scottish and Southern may then commit to sponsoring the remaining 150,000, which will be couriered over the following months. Lucid Thinking has lined up two back-up sponsors and there are a number of other box sponsorship opportunities available.
Mark Cunningham, joint managing director and founder of Moveme.com, said: “The Home Moving Box is a great tool for home movers – it delivers what you need, direct, on the day you need it. For a sampling manager it’s a dream. The Home Moving Box is the first of its kind in the UK.”
Pickles at Lucid Thinking said that The Home Moving Box had received interest from other FMCG brands interested in including their products. These may participate after the first wave of 50,000 boxes has been delivered. He also said that there were options to include more brands and to evolve the scheme into a larger box.
Moveme.com, which is backed by Lastminute.com founder Brent Hoberman, is intended to ease the process of moving house by providing a one-stop-shop for movers to inform organisations such as banks, telecoms firms and utility firms of their move.