Should Your Corporate Typeface Reflect Your Product Category? : A Quantitative Study

Abstract: The typeface a company uses for its products can positively influence consumers’ attitude towards the products due to the fact that typeface conveys connotative meaning. An important factor for this influence is the congruence between the connotative meaning of the typeface and the connotative meaning of the product category. The purpose of this study was to explain how congruence versus incongruence between the connotative meaning of typeface and a product category affects consumer attitude towards the product. The theoretical framework was based on particular typeface design characteristics, the tricomponent model of attitudes, homeostasis and the concepts of congruence and incongruence in connection to typeface. The authors applied a nonequivalent group experimental design and used survey questionnaires with a congruent typeface-product category condition and an incongruent typeface-product category condition for gathering data. The findings pointed out that consumer attitudes vary between the two conditions. In more detail, it was found that both a congruent and an incongruent condition can lead to a positive consumer attitude, however, the attitude was less positive under the incongruent condition. Additionally, it can be resumed that consumers’ likelihood to purchase the product was higher when the connotative meaning of the typeface was congruent with the connotative meaning of the product category