In 1978, officials started a campaign that promoted kindness to tourists, but were told off by then Prime Minister Lee Kuan Yew for practising double standards. "To be courteous to free-spending tourists and to be rude to fellow Singaporeans is to demean ourselves," he said. "Then we become a despicable people, moved only by the thought of profit."

The Speak Mandarin campaign insisted that for Singaporean Chinese, Mandarin is their mother tongue. Lee Kuan Yew recognised this as a stretch, and allowed that for many Chinese here, "dialect is the real mother tongue", and Mandarin is a "stepmother tongue".

In 2004, Romancing Singapore was a campaign to address falling birth rates after three decades of birth-control campaigns. The campaign promoted perfumes aimed at boosting fertility; rock climbing for couples; and for Valentine's Day, a "Love Boat" river race where couples built a raft from bamboo or rubber tyres. There was also the "Lovers' Challenge", where couples ran hand-in-hand up a 43-floor building.

The National Courtesy Campaign took the push for politeness onto the worldwide web in 1998 when they created a website that provided the "dos and don'ts of a friendly, courteous online surfer".

In 2003, Singapore launched a "Happy Toilet" campaign, where auditors rated 70,000 public toilets, not on their emotional health, but on hygiene, layout and ergonomics.