Building customer confidence in the automobile age: Canadian Tire 1928‐1939
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Purpose The purpose of this paper is to examine how one Canadian retailer developed customer confidence in the interwar years when the automobile was in its infancy. The emphasis is on products and product information in the mail‐order catalogue. Design/methodology/approach The research design strategy draws on a longitudinal case study research using primary archival data collection and analysis. Findings In the 1930s, the firm used multiple approaches to respond to opportunities and challenges and to reassure customers through product assortment, guarantees, branding, quality assurance and support services. Generating an extensive mail‐order business occurred in tandem with the opening of stores, and together these approaches created rapid growth. In the early years, the emphasis was on maintenance, repairs and some augmentation through accessories. From the mid‐to late 1930s, with easing economic conditions, the focus shifts from automobile functionality to include roles for leisure and sport products, and the injunction to engage with the Canadian countryside. Originality/value The paper uses original historical research to contribute a new way of understanding how retailers developed customer confidence. The study contributes to knowledge about Canadian retailing in the interwar years, and the means for building customer confidence using a range of marketing techniques. For researchers, the study demonstrates a further example of the efficacy of using archival materials to explore marketing questions.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.020 | 0.007 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.005 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.006 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".