Hypothesis (H1): Handwritten typefaces increase preference for the advertised product when used in the advertisement.

Hypothesis (H 2): Handwritten typefaces create the presence of other people when used in advertisements.

Human beings are social, and therefore the presence of others impacts their feelings. According to Schroll et al. (2018), the presence of other people does not have to be real or physical, but there are cues which can make people feel that they have others around them. Such cues are the ones which reflect or represent people’s character. Handwritten typefaces are among such signals that represent human character and therefore create a human presence. According to Ren et al. (2013), Candello et al. (2017) and Schroll et al. (2018), people perceive handwritten typefaces to be close to human and therefore, develop social relationships with them. The closeness is as a result of their resemblance to the human character of writing. Niu (2016), adds that the typefaces are charming because they resemble perfect human handwriting. People admire what others have better than them, and therefore, they will admire handwritten typefaces on an advert because they are usually perfect through computer generation. Durdyyeva (2014) and Bartal (2013) extends that position where they found that the handwritten typefaces are perceived to be other human beings and therefore people consider the adverts with such as part of the society.

Advertisements using handwritten typefaces increases connection with the audience because of the humanizing nature they create (Liu, 2019; Nazarkevych et al., 2017).  The relationship and the human element further makes the audience develop an emotional attachment to the product which the advertisement demonstrates. Liu (2019), in research, found that using handwritten typefaces in a hotel menu increases the preference of the food.  The emotions which the typefaces crate makes the audience to prefer the advertised product and the chances to buy it grows (Chemin, 2014; Candello et al., 2017; Kar et al., 2019). The typefaces therefore when used in advertisement creates the presence of others leading to the preference of the advertised product

The hypothesis is unique because it relates handwritten typefaces directly to the advertised product or company. Other researches or hypothesis have looked at the relationship between the fonts and the advertisement itself without looking at their impact or liking or disliking the advertised product.

References

Bartal, O. (2013). Text as Image in Japanese Advertising Typography Design. Design Issues, 29(1), 51–66.

Candello, H., Pinhanez, C., & Figueiredo, F. (2017, May). Typefaces and the perception of humanness in natural language chatbots. In Proceedings of the 2017 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (pp. 3476-3487). ACM.

Chemin, A. (2014). Handwriting vs typing: is the pen still mightier than the keyboard. The Guardian (pp. 1-5).

Durdyyeva, G. S. (2014). The language of tourism advertising with the concentration on the textual analysis. In Vědecko vydavatelské centrum «Sociosféra-CZ» (pp. 9-20).

Kar, R., Saha, S., Bera, S. K., Kavallieratou, E., Bhateja, V., & Sarkar, R. (2019). Novel approaches towards slope and slant correction for tri-script handwritten word images. The Imaging Science Journal, 1-12.

Liu, S. Q., Choi, S., & Mattila, A. S. (2019). Love is in the menu: Leveraging healthy restaurant brands with handwritten typeface. Journal of Business Research, 98, 289-298.

Nazarkevych, M., Nazarkevych, H., Zakharchenko, I., & Kucherenko, A. (2017, September). Development and processing of the cyrillic handwritten font. In 2017 12th International Scientific and Technical Conference on Computer Sciences and Information Technologies (CSIT) (Vol. 1, pp. 215-218). IEEE.

Niu, C. (2016, May). The Design of Headword in the Online Shopping’s Advertisement. In 2016 International Conference on Economy, Management and Education Technology. Atlantis Press.

Ren, X., Du, J., & Xia, L. (2013). Has Handwriting Become Obsolete? The Effect of Handwriting on Warmth Perceptions of Service Firms (pp. 1-18).

Schroll, R., Schnurr, B., & Grewal, D. (2018). Humanizing Products with Handwritten Typefaces. Journal of Consumer Research, 45(3), 648