I’ve wondered about this for a while: There are certain marketing terms I see that just don’t make any sense to me and I don’t get how they don’t count as false advertising.
The two examples I’m thinking of at the moment are:
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“Best Seller” on books. There do seem to be a lot of these. Definitionally can’t that simply not be true? There can be only one “best” for a given metric such as book sales in copies or dollars.
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“Homemade” on various foods either from restaurants or packaged things in supermarkets. Like surely “homemade” implies it was made in someone’s home right? There is also the less obvious implication that it was handmade as opposed to produced by some automated factory process. But surely this can’t be the case right? There’s no way someone made the jar of tomato sauce I bought at the store in their home unless they have people living in a factory.
I’d also be curious about any other terms like this that I’ve forgotten or don’t know about.
Best sellers are mostly a self-reinforcing process. Money decides who gets educated, academia decides whose ideas get represented in education, publication decides which of those works become popular. If something is not promoted it will not be sold. They also have separate best-seller lists, so it’s self-aggrandizing pageantry as well.
What country are we talking about, by the way? I mostly see “homestyle” not “homemade” in marketing.
New York Times bestsellers will invariably be awful. Find personalities who are drawn to a deeper art scene, this will teleport you 25 years into the future withput their disadvantage of being jaded. Trust me, they’re looking to offload it to people who still have feelings left
Oh. Apologies for the US-defaultism. That’s the context I see this in.
As for book stuff, do you have any recommendations of good recommenders? I’ve recently picked up reading novels again after kind of a while of just reading non-fiction. At the moment I’ve just been going to the library and grabbing something off the shelf a bit randomly.