Consumer Processing of Advertising

This review partially updates the 1983 CIRA review of consumer information processing [Shimp and Gresham 1983]. It focuses on how people process advertising during or immediately after they are exposed to it. As advertising research has rapidly developed and expanded in the years since the Shimp and Gresham review, significant changes have occurred in what researchers assume about advertising and how people process advertising. In 1983 “consumer information processing” could be thoroughly summarized in the Shimp and Gresham review, but the topic is now too broad for a single review, at least without running the risk of producing a document longer than anyone would read. The present review thus concentrates on areas of the information processing field that appear to have dominated recent research streams.