Branding “the Bay/la Baie”: Corporate Identity, the Hudson's Bay Company, and the Burden of History in the 1960s
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract: In 1965, the Hudson's Bay Company (hbc) unveiled “the Bay/la Baie” as the primary corporate identifier for its urban retail stores in Canada. At the same time, the company was also preparing to celebrate its 300th anniversary in 1970. Rather than viewing the “modern” Bay in opposition to the historical name, this article argues that competing regional historical sensibilities were central to the redesign of the company's corporate image. Following the company's merger with the Montreal-based Morgan's department stores in 1960, the hbc found itself navigating the historical attachments of its western base, the nationalist aspirations of Quebec, and the indifference of metropolitan Ontario. By drawing together corporate discussions around design, typeface, marketing, historical displays, and a commemorative film produced by Christopher Chapman, this article explores the image worlds assembled by the hbc to bridge multiple identities. It also analyzes how historical consciousness itself became an object of study for the company in trying to understand and predict consumer behaviour. The tensions and debates around corporate identity and the 1970 tercentenary point to the significance of visual aesthetics in the evocation and erasure of particular histories in the 1960s.
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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 | 0.003 | 0.003 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.003 | 0.006 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.006 | 0.016 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.007 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 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".