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:

  • “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.

  • “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.

  • SSTF@lemmy.world
    22·
    3 days ago

    “Best seller” depends on the metric being used, this article has some simple explanations, including how Amazon niche categories can be gamed to get a book to technically be a best seller.

    Because Amazon refreshes ranks at least once a day (often hourly), a well-timed promotional spike can crown you a #1 “best seller” in dozens of micro-categories. Amazon itself acknowledges that ranks are relative and heavily weighted toward recent activity. Amazon Kindle Direct Publishing One TikTok push or email blast can deliver the screenshot—hence the glut of “international best-selling authors” whose lifetime sales barely break four figures.

    For a more prestigious listing, like being a New York Times Best-Seller, that’s just lies if the NY Times likes you.

    The Times, which had always claimed that the list was compiled from computer sales, countered in court that its list “was not mathematically objective but was editorial content and thus protected under the Constitution as free speech.”

    In something like “Rao’s Homemade” sauces, the word “Homemade” is part of the registered name of the sauce (if you look close you can see the little “R” symbol for a Registered Trademark on the label), not a defined descriptor that needs to meet some kind of legal standard. Yes, it is trying to trick you into thinking of it as being less industrially made than it really is. Marketing.

    At least you didn’t ask about boneless chicken wings…