that “apart from high class retail stores in large towns, it is difficult if not impossible to know which of the buyers are ultimately consumers . . . [this] applies not only to divisible merchandise such as matches in bulk, but also to indivisible items, such as bicycles.”36 Even this confession was an understatement. A former African employee of Kingsway Department Stores also described difficulties in identifying “real consumers,”37 and store policies that prohibited the sale of large quantities to suspected resellers further illustrate the dilemma. But trouble locating the consumer was not strictly the concern of firms and their employees; colonial governments also tried to make distinctions between people who bought for personal use and those who intended to engage in resale. A whole assortment of names cropped up around efforts to pinpoint this difference. “The ultimate consumer,” “the end-use consumer,” and the “the bona-fide customer” were used in both corporate and government documents in attempts to make this distinction. At this point, we need to consider a question: If firms were still collecting profits and keeping overhead costs low, why would they care about identifying the “ultimate” or “end-use” consumer? One reason was that the system of reselling made collecting statistics on sales and creating standardized policies extremely difficult; it also made firms’ compliance with postwar government-imposed price controls and quotas an arduous, and often expensive, task.
However, the other, more profound reason, was about power. This system of commodity distribution could be quite profitable, but it had a lasting consequence: it created a large gap in what the firms actually knew about local consumer demand and desire. On the West African coast, trends changed rapidly, especially in the sale of textiles or wax prints. As an agent of the UTC stationed in Akuse warned, “any European staff taking a leave lasting more than two months” would have to completely relearn consumer tastes.38 Gaps in market knowledge led to huge profit losses. As a former UTC manager reflecting on his forty-year career wrote in 1961, “Nobody took pains to do market research . . . the stores were filled with products that were many times useless.”39 Full shelves of rotting supplies, the overstocking of unpopular brands, and unsold items sitting in warehouses for years: all these realities were a constant source of frustration among firms. As we all know from every trip to the grocery store, changes in packaging and a product’s overall aesthetic can also affect sales.40 Bottles of Brilliantine hair product would only sell if wrapped in paper; sugar sold in cardboard boxes was preferred to that sold in paper bags; sleeping mats had to have red instead of blue trim, and only blue and green cars should be ordered, as red cars were “very unpopular.” Even details like an item’s smell had to be considered; on a stocktaking visit to various stores, one UAC employee asked, “Can we not obtain tablet soap similar to White Windsor with Eucalyptus scent?” 41 What Africans perceived as poor packaging, the wrong color, or an unpleasant smell were as consequential to an item’s saleability as they were baffling to the firms’ management a world away in London or Basel.
As in most aspects of colonialism, stereotypes framed by racialized assumptions about the colonized abounded; firms often classified African consumer behavior as conservative, selective, and overly brand conscious. One reason cited for this selectiveness was that African consumers had particular difficulties in obtaining redress for defective merchandise from overseas producers.42 Another reason was the low income of farmers and wage earners, who had to shop carefully because of limited funds. What is less apparent in these observations is that when firms described “the African consumer” they were mainly referring to the demands of their storekeepers and credit customers who were responsible for resale. This gap between firms and ordinary consumers put European managers in a difficult predicament: invaluable market knowledge could only be gained through the feedback of African intermediaries, and this dependency was fragile—it had to be cultivated, maintained, and renewed. Of course, commercial intermediaries reflected the preferences of those they sold to; they, too, wanted to make a profit, but this was not always the case. Intermediaries thus wielded power in determining which goods gained popularity in the market and had a huge impact on shaping and translating consumer demand.
Let us now turn to the role of advertising in locating the consumer. As one of the primary means through which historians have studied how consumers were imagined and created, advertising often had different objectives in Ghana. The practice of using advertisements, and the principles of marketing, developed in their current form around the 1920s in the United States and other Western markets, were neither as established nor as meaningful in West Africa.43 Even after the Second World War, advertising geared toward African audiences was considered “in its infancy,” according to one UAC merchandise director.44 A large percentage of early print advertising in Ghana was focused on promoting the reputation of certain firms rather than endorsing specific products. Many ads were produced to convince African businessmen and retailers to buy stock from firms (rather than from other sources like mail-order catalogs) and thus carried a different message. The hope was to deter African retailers from importing on their own. Of course, print advertisements geared toward elite and middle-class African shoppers existed. Early Gold Coast newspapers were full of ads for brands like Ideal milk, Ovaltine, Wright biscuits, Tin-apa pilchards, and Waterman pens, but the images in the ads featured mostly Europeans.45 Posters and signboards hanging in stores and high–traffic areas like railway stations were also part of urban landscapes.46 In most cases, however, print advertisements reflected the competition among various trading firms attempting to attract potential retailers to sell on their behalf; the need to cultivate and stimulate consumer demand for a particular product seemed secondary. Furthermore, in times of commodity rationing and scarcity, product-directed advertising became obsolete.
During the period of decolonization and in the years following Ghanaian independence, firms appropriated advertising for another purpose—namely, they used advertisements as a tool to build up goodwill toward a company and publicize corporate policies. The goal was to link the firm to ideas of reciprocity and quality rather than to promote a particular product. UAC campaigns and advertisements announcing their role in “Africanization,” or policies focused on promoting Africans to managerial positions that were formerly reserved for Europeans, were some key examples.47 While firms paid lip service to courting the African consumer, advertising and marketing were not the primary ways they did so. Prior to the 1950s, efforts were limited mainly to questioning African staff about what products they preferred and used. The first large-scale market research project, titled Project Joseph, was not undertaken until 1954. Paid for by the UAC and conducted by the Export Advertising Service to test West African reactions to different forms of press advertising, the project was primarily geared toward helping the firm improve its public image in response to anticolonial activism. As a result, whatever market research was gained was not specific enough to actually change a product’s design or production, nor was it apparently intended for that purpose. Furthermore, tests were conducted on six hundred of the UAC’s own staff from the Gambia, the Gold Coast, Nigeria, and Sierra Leone. While recognizing that the firm must have considered its own African staff members as archetypal middle-class shoppers who warranted research, its strategy also showed a continued reliance on information from intermediaries. Thus, drawing on market research and advertising to uncover the underlying assumptions and changing values of consumers, as a number of other studies on consumerism have done, carries certain limitations when applied to the Ghanaian context.
The “ultimate consumer” did not become any easier to single out after independence in 1957. As foreign firms retreated due to nationalist pressures and a number of policies put in place to curb their power, state-owned corporations like the Ghana National Trading Corporation (GNTC) were established and replaced many of the firms’ long-standing functions. By 1961 the GNTC, under President Kwame Nkrumah and his Convention People’s Party (CPP), took over a number of wholesale and retail outlets across the country as well as credit customer accounts. Though it was intended to protect the consumer, state ownership did not introduce any major changes in how people accessed and purchased goods, and the GNTC reproduced some of the same problems identified by ordinary Ghanaians during the colonial period. In the years following independence, similar accusations of favoritism and the creation of artificial shortages emerged. Like many African nationalist leaders, Nkrumah hoped to reduce dependency on foreign firms through investment in local manufacturing and by implementing import substitution