One day, while scrolling through social media, I stumbled upon a meme making fun of Comic Sans. It wasn’t just a one-off joke; soon I noticed more posts mocking the font. Curious, I looked into why Comic Sans triggers such strong reactions. Its comic book origins likely explain its informal, light-hearted nature, and its association with a lack of seriousness. This got me thinking: fonts aren’t just visual choices, they shape how we perceive information.
With support from the Venture Fund, I’ve had the opportunity to explore how typefaces affect consumer responses, particularly in relation to pricing for organic foods. This study focuses on how the curvature of typefaces in price information can influence consumer perceptions of organic products. The goal was to uncover the mechanisms behind these effects.
The organic food market has grown significantly in recent years, reflecting shifting priorities, with consumers increasingly focused on health, sustainability, and environmental awareness. In our study, we specifically looked at how the curvature of typefaces affects the perception of both “virtue” organic foods (e.g., apples) and “vice” organic foods (e.g., chocolate). We predicted that the difficulty consumers have in processing price information, due to the curviness of the typeface, would influence consumers’ perceptions of price fairness.
Previous research on typefaces has mostly compared the effects of machine-written versus hand-written fonts on consumer behaviour.
Our study, however, took a different approach by exploring how the curvature of hand-written typefaces influences consumer responses. A pre-test helped us select two hand-written fonts that were similar in overall appeal but differed in their perceived curviness.
What we found was that the curviness of the typeface made the price of "vice" organic foods seem fairer, while it had no effect on the perception of price fairness for "virtue" organic foods. We also discovered that the difficulty in processing the price information, caused by the curvy typeface, was the key factor driving this effect for the vice foods. Consumers appeared more likely to justify purchasing indulgent, vice products when the price felt fair, while this same effect didn’t apply to healthier foods. This could be explained by the fact that, for vice products like chocolate, the misattribution of the difficulty in processing price information (due to the curvy font) could be used to justify the purchase. In contrast, this misattribution didn’t seem to play a similar role in consumers’ decisions to purchase healthier items like apples.
Looking forward, we plan to continue investigating the effects of typeface curvature through field studies. We’re particularly interested in using Facebook’s Ad Manager for online studies and testing in retail stores to see how these effects play out in real-world settings.
As you visit retail stores, we encourage you to pay attention to how product information—especially pricing—is presented for organic foods. It might be worth taking a second look at the typefaces used and considering how they could be influencing your perceptions.
Euejung Hwang is a Lecturer in Marketing.