"The Good Shopper" (Empire Marketing Board)
An Empire Marketing Board poster casts buying Empire-grown goods as an ordinary household virtue, folding a state advertising campaign into the persona of a sensible shopper rather than naming it as government messaging.
The Empire Marketing Board of the United Kingdom issued this poster, signed F.N. and printed for H.M. Stationery Office, around 1930. It shows Australian butter under the heading "THE GOOD SHOPPER". The campaign casts buying Empire-grown goods as an ordinary household virtue and places a state advertising effort inside the persona of a sensible shopper. Plain folks is tagged for that everyday persona, and glittering generalities for the virtue attached to the label "good" in place of any claim about the product.
Propaganda techniques used in this poster
- Date
- 1930
- Period
- Interwar
- Made by
- Empire Marketing Board (United Kingdom)
Full record
Region, Country, Medium, Issuer type, Regime, Leader, Audience, Purpose, Themes, Source, Rights
- Region
- Western and Central Europe
- Country
- United Kingdom
- Medium
- Poster
- Issuer type
- State
- Regime
- Macdonald Government
- Leader
- Ramsay Macdonald
- Audience
- Domestic public
- Purpose
- Persuade or win support
- Themes
- Economy and finance, Empire and colonialism
- Source
- Identified Openly sourced: the speaker is who they say they are
- Source
- Wikimedia Commons (Library and Archives Canada via Flickr), retrieved September 27, 2026
- Rights
- CC BY 2.0 (Library and Archives Canada Flickr release); printed for HMSO c. 1926-34, Crown copyright expired
"The Good Shopper", signed F.N., Empire Marketing Board poster; Library and Archives Canada
Text on the object
Original (English) · read from the image, not independently checked
EMPIRE STORES [illegible] BUTTER AUSTRALIAN [illegible] Finest AUSTRALIAN BUTTER THE GOOD SHOPPER B.M.4. ISSUED BY THE EMPIRE MARKETING BOARD. PRINTED FOR H.M. STATIONERY OFFICE BY WATERLOW & SONS LTD. LONDON, DUNSTABLE & WATFORD.
Two small paper signs pasted inside the shop windows (one reading '...BUTTER', the other 'AUSTRALIAN...') are shown at an angle and partly cut off by the window frames; the parts that cannot be read confidently are marked illegible rather than guessed. The 'FN' monogram in the lower right corner of the illustration is the artist's initials, not further text, and is not transcribed.
