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…

  • vapor_body@lemmy.mlEnglish
    41·
    3 days ago

    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

    • darthelmet@lemmy.worldOP
      2·
      3 days ago

      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.

  • CultLeader4Hire@lemmy.world
    11·
    2 days ago

    I’ve never seen any packaged food say homemade and homemade at a restaurant just means “house made” as in it was made in the restaurant like most food in a non-chain restaurant is. Marketing is purposefully opaque