Why Hard-to-Read Ads Cost Gyms the Sale
Key Takeaways
- Hard-to-read ads lead consumers to make poor decisions by confusing reading effort with decision difficulty.
- Perceptual disfluency misleads consumers during choice moments, pushing them towards familiar options rather than evaluating offers.
- To improve ad effectiveness, split brand imagery from decision information, ensuring key details are easily readable.
A forthcoming study in the Journal of Consumer Research, eleven experiments with more than 9,000 people, points to a reason even a clean, single-offer ad can lose the sale: hard-to-read ads change how people decide, not just how much they like the look of you.
Shahryar Mohsenin and Kurt Munz tested what a hard-to-read font or a busy background does to a choice, measuring what people picked rather than what they said they liked. When the details were set in harder-to-process type, people leaned on whatever felt intuitively right, a familiar brand or a recommendation, and skipped past the numbers they were meant to weigh.
TL;DR: A hard-to-read ad or sign-up page does not make people concentrate. They misread the effort of reading as the difficulty of deciding, so instead of comparing your offer they reach for the familiar option. Make the part where they choose easy to read and the choice swings back to what you are selling.
What the research found
The mix-up is the mechanism. Reading something awkward feels like effort, and in the middle of a choice the brain files that effort under the wrong heading, reading “the text is fiddly” as “the decision is hard.” From there it shifts into faster, rougher judgement. The pull was strongest in people who believe a fast decision is usually a sound one, and it disappeared in two cases: when people were told the font rather than the choice was causing the friction, and when they had nothing to choose at all.
Because the experiments ran online rather than on a real gym forecourt, treat the size of the effect as a direction, not a promise. Eleven preregistered experiments pointing the same way make that direction hard to dismiss.
Perceptual disfluency is the small sense of effort you feel when information is physically hard to take in: a thin font over a photo, or a price table squeezed too small to scan. Nothing about the offer has changed, only the work of reading it. Your brain notices that friction, and if you happen to be choosing something in that moment, it can mistake the friction for the decision. It is the awkward twin of processing fluency, the ease your brain reads as trust. Both play out on the gym floor in the Cognitive Bias Library.
Where hard-to-read ads show up in your marketing
Look for it wherever your best information is fighting your own design: a price sitting on a high-energy training shot, or plan inclusions set in pale grey because that photographed cleaner. Each one drops a layer of reading effort where a prospect is trying to compare and commit.
It bites here and nowhere near your About page, because comparison is the expensive part. The slow, deliberate thinking Daniel Kahneman described is what holds one tier up against another, and it tires easily. Pile physical reading effort on top of that mental work and people take the shortcut.
The move: split the brand layer from the decision layer
Split the ad in two. The hero image and the text-over-photo mood belong to the half that sells the feeling of the place. The half they act on, where they read the price and weigh the tiers, exists to be read without effort, so keep the styling away from it. When those numbers are hard to read, people fall back to the safest tier, which is rarely the one you make money on.
You will know it landed by the questions you start getting. When the offer is legible, people argue with it: which tier suits them, whether the intro pack rolls over. Make them work to read it and they turn up already defaulted, asking for “the normal one,” or they do not turn up. How long the decision takes, and which tier they pick, tells the same story from the other end.
A worked example
When I scored twenty campaign pages from the big Australian chains, Jetts, Snap, Anytime, F45, the clutter was not what got me. It was how much of the deciding information had been made hard to read on purpose, to look sharp. Prices sat over busy photography, and offer terms shrank into asterisked grey footnotes. One page in five would not show the price until you had typed in your postcode, so the single number a prospect came for was not on the screen at all.
Where this goes wrong
The trap is reading this as licence to strip the character out of everything. Difficulty only misleads at the moment of choosing. Away from the decision, on the half of your marketing that builds desire, a distinctive font or a moody image is earning its keep, and flattening it gains nothing. Stranger still, a little friction can make people remember a line better when they are not deciding anything, which is part of why an awkward tagline sometimes sticks. The distinctive font is fine right up until it lands on top of the price.
The question worth sitting with
On your busiest ad, can a prospect read the number they came to compare without working for it?
People also ask
What is perceptual disfluency in advertising?
Perceptual disfluency is the effort you feel when information is physically hard to take in, separate from whether the message is complicated. A low-contrast font or a price crammed into a tiny table creates it. It matters most at the moment of choice, because people can misread the effort of reading as the difficulty of deciding and pick on instinct instead.
How do I stop my gym ads being hard to read?
Split the ad. Put the atmosphere and the styled type on the part that sells the feeling, and give the price and the call to action a clean, readable space of their own. If someone has to work to read the number they came for, they will usually retreat to the safest option rather than the one you are steering them toward.
Why do prospects pick the cheapest or most familiar option on my pricing page?
Usually because you have made the comparison too much work. A hard-to-read pricing page pushes people toward the cue that costs no effort, the lowest number or the name they already know. A bigger discount rarely fixes it; legible deciding information does, because then people weigh what each tier actually gives them.
Most of the money goes into getting someone to look at the ad. The sale is lost in the half-second they spend trying to read it.
You have got the move for the ad or page where the choice happens. If you want the same behavioural-science read across the whole funnel, from the first Instagram tile to the sign-up page, book a free 30-minute chat.
References: Mohsenin & Munz (forthcoming), Journal of Consumer Research; Kahneman 2011 (Thinking, Fast and Slow, Farrar, Straus and Giroux).
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