The typeface is part of the message, so choose wisely

I was interested to read Suzanne Labarre’s Fast Company piece about filmmaker Errol Morris’s covert experiment with nytimes.com readers into the subconscious effect on believability that the use of certain typefaces made to a statement.
Essentially, different readers saw the same words but in different typefaces. The result was that Baskerville (a serif font not dissimilar to the classic Times) convinced readers more than four others, three of which were sans serif. Not by much, but it worked.
Labarre pronounces herself surprised, but to anyone used to working with fonts, as I did for more than 13 years as a newspaper sub-editor, it’s no surprise at all — some fonts have more authority than others.
Serif fonts, through their use by authoritative organisations and media in countries using Western script are associated with those bodies and the formality, reliability and authority of their messages. So their mood is formal, official, starchy.
Conversely, fonts like Helvetica, Arial and Trebuchet (without the formal serifs) look more relaxed, informal and approachable. So they’ve predominantly been used for less formal communications and stories.
Over time then, by association, we have come to associate each face with a degree of formality.
So how can you use this in your marcomms?
Simple – abandon the notion of having a standard font your company uses in all marcomms like press releases and choose one for each client which matches the level of formality in their brand essence, factoring in the need for a greater or lesser degree of believability based on its existing level of credibility with its target audience or the media through which the message/s will be communicated.
So for a bank you’ll want the solidity of a serif font, but for a fun, challenger, lifestyle brand like a theme park, a more relaxed sans serif font should be right, unless the message is formal, as with crisis comms.
But not Comic Sans. Except perhaps in a fun heading relating to children, or something childlike. No release will ever be readable, let alone taken seriously, in that font.