Author:

Keywords:

congruency, typeface, persuasion, advertising

Abstract:

Background: Typography plays a natural and important role in creative design. Playing with fonts is among the first things young children do when exploring the uses of a word processing program. Adults and design aficionados often mock the use of a font such as Comic Sans (e.g. Barcelona’s soccer team using that typeface on their shirts) or the use of dull, business-like typefaces such as Arial or Times New Roman. Despite particular typefaces being singled out, most of a reader’s interactions with fonts are rather implicit. Still, font choices could have persuasive consequences thus rendering these choices strategic as well as creative. Method: Based on congruity theory (e.g., Yoon, 2013) and earlier research on fonts by Van Rompay and Pruyn (2011), we designed a 2 (product positioning: luxurious vs. casual) x 2 (typeface congruency: congruent vs. incongruent) x 2 (matching: congruency for water bottles vs. for car tires) mixed design with the first two variables manipulated within subjects and the latter between subjects. 98 adult participants completed the online experimental procedure in which they saw six advertisements of which four were target advertisements with manipulated fonts. Target advertisements were for water bottle brands and car tire brands and were pre-tested (n = 20) with respect to how casual versus luxurious they were perceived. Fonts were also pretested with respect to the same dimensions and Din and Counselor Script were chosen as target fonts. The original target advertisements were then manipulated such that the original tag line was replaced by a tag line in a manipulated font. Each participants saw one set of congruently advertised products and one set of incongruently advertised products. Participants provided ratings for each of the six shown advertisements concerning attitude towards the ad, brand credibility, and expected pricing. Afterwards, participants also engaged in a manipulation check of ad and font ratings. Results: Repeated measures ANOVAs on all three dependent variables produced similar results. Brands performed better when they were advertised with a congruency between the advertisement and the used typeface. This congruency benefit is most articulate for casual advertisements that particularly result in negative perceptions (attitudes, credibility, price) when they apply a luxurious font. The effects were also somewhat more articulate for the high involvement car tires than for the low involvement water bottles. Conclusion: Our study demonstrates that subtle marketing cues, such as the used typeface in a print/banner advertisement, affect consumer responses through inferences with respect to the congruency between general ad image and typeface. Usually, such decisions like typeface are considered to be “mere creative” but evidence accumulates that they also bear strategic implications.