ABSTRACT
The subject-producing aspect of the marketing campaign marks both a similarity and a difference in comparison with the work of its historical predecessor the Empire Marketing Board (EMB). The EMB was established in 1926 in the context of the resurgence of imperial protectionism in the wake of World War I. It was an attempt to educate the British public about empire and encourage the purchase of empire goods to foster imperial economic development without the expense of imperial protection (Constantine, 1984, 1986; Mackenzie, 1984; Meredith, 1987). The then conservative government, inheriting the initiative from Labour who established the Imperial Economic Commission with an award of £1 million to find new ways of boosting empire trade. Its recommendations led to the establishment of the Empire Marketing Board whose remit, like that of the marketing campaign, linked domestic consumption to external trade as a means of fostering domestic employability. There are four points of ‘uncanny’ similarity between the Empire Marketing Board and the Development Awareness Campaign in the UK. The first is the notion of interdependence explored at length in Chapter 3, and its link to domestic employability and the stemming of parochialism responding to market research that reveals a substantial lack of knowledge on the part of UK citizenry. Both the DfID and the EMB conducted market research and posited their activities in response to the lack of appropriate domestic knowledge. The EMB conducted market research to garner the level of domestic knowledge of empire and found that ‘few people could name even half of the territories which make up the British Colonial Empire’, in addition to research to raise the standards of empire exports to Britain. Similarly, DfID has paired up with VSO and the BBC to conduct a number of research projects designed to gauge UK perception of global issues and the content of media coverage on the developing world. Thus, like the efforts of the Empire Marketing Board, the promotion of development awareness is accompanied by market research that demonstrates the need for awareness raising by showing up a lack of knowledge of developing country issues on the part of UK citizenry.
