Best needs a witness

Half the burger signs in Riyadh say best, and best is the most expensive word on any of them.

It costs nothing to print and everything to be believed, because a reader does two different things with a sign. A claim gets checked. A description gets skipped. Best is a claim, so the eye stops on it for a quarter of a second, looks for something to check it against, finds a photograph of a burger and a phone number, and moves on. The word was paid for and never arrived.

Better has the same problem on a smaller budget. Better than what, judged by whom, measured how. It hands the work to the reader, and a person walking past a shopfront at nine in the evening is not going to do the work.

Different is cheaper and it lands. One patty, ground in the morning, salt and nothing else. Open until three. One size only. The bread comes from the bakery two doors down. None of that is a claim about quality, so there is nothing to argue with, and all of it can be carried in the head and repeated to a cousin, which is the only distribution most small places will ever have.

So a claim needs a witness, and the witness has to be small enough to prove. A named supplier. A father's name over the counter. A photograph of the same shopfront from the year it opened. A price that has not moved since. Something anyone can go and check without taking your word for it.

The smallest specific thing you can prove will outsell the largest thing you cannot, and it costs less to print.