Fabled Fonts = Timeless Trust

An often overlooked cue in package design is typography. A recent study in the Journal of Marketing suggests that for certain brands, old-timey typefaces can be quite powerful.

The authors focus on the concept of anemoia, a relatively new term that means a longing for a past era we have never personally experienced. Ever watched Yellowstone and dreamed about life in the Old West?  Did Downton Abbey have you fantasizing about being a post-Edwardian aristocrat in a cozy mansion?  If so, you know anemoia.

In the Journal of Marketing study, old-fashioned font types also can create anemoia. Furthermore, that feeling can increase perceptions of safety and also drive purchase intent and willingness to pay a premium for a brand or product.

Ironically, if you add information about a brand’s actual date of origination (e.g. “since 1895”) it wipes out the effect.  The type font is an implicit cue. Stating the year is an explicit cue, and when you make it explicit, it loses its power. We are more likely to be influenced when we don’t know we’re being influenced.

Also, this doesn’t work for futuristic brands. So, if ChatGPT suddenly adopted a 1930s Art Deco font, it likely would not make people feel more positively about the brand. For the effect to hold, the brand or product has to have some connection to the past, even a theoretical or tenuous one.  Even if the brand is new, for example, maybe it is in an old category. That can still work.

There are ethical questions at play here, of course: If your product really is unsafe, then using an old-fashioned font to mask that doesn’t seem very sporting.  

There are also other open questions. The authors mostly studied the effect on perceptions of brand safety, but old-school fonts also may impact consumer perceptions in other ways, like whether they view a brand as durable or environmentally aware, for example. Those are topics that could be addressed in future research.