ABSTRACT
Processing is the general term that applies to the short-term attention paid to marketing communication and what follows. It occurs with each exposure to a message execution, however delivered: through advertising or promotion, the package, even the product itself, or just hearing the brand name. Message processing is obviously dependent on exposure to the message, and if successfully processed will lead to the desired response. People respond ‘consciously’ to everything they are exposed to and to which they actively attend neurologically. Psychologists like to talk about this in terms of cognitive response, which is nothing more than a conscious activity that goes on when actively processing information. William J. McGuire was one of the founding fathers of attitude change theory, and he described six processing steps that must occur for any message to be persuasive, which he called an information processing paradigm.
