How Advertising Affects Consumers

Advertising, as currently practiced, ignores all that has been learned by cognitive psychologists in the past 30 or 40 years. Consumers process all incoming information, including advertising, in a very complex yet instantaneous manner. Advertising is not a stimulus in the outmoded behavioral psychology stimulus– response model of human information processing. Advertising, if it is attended to at all, is nothing more than a net addition to everything the consumer has previously learned and retained about the brand. The challenge for advertising is to find ways and means to bypass or upset business as usual in the consumer's brain and to build an enduring perceptual representation of the brand as one that is acceptable and desirable.