Decision-making

Decision-making is the process of selecting between two or more possible courses of action in response to a single stimulus

One way to think about decision-making is that it is information processing comprised of five stages.

• Exposure
• Attention
• Comprehension
• Acceptance
• Retention

means:

• Exposure alludes to the customer having proximity to a message so that one or more of the person's senses is activated.
• Attention refers to the requirement that the person allocate information processing capacity to the experienced stimulus.
  Comprehension means the message must be acquired, interpreted, and meaning attached to it.
• Acceptance means that once meaning for the message is established, it must be filed into the belief system of the individual.
• Finally, Retention occurs when the meaning interpretation is passed into long-term memory.

This defines the challenge when communicating to any customer: a person must successfully traverse all five stages for the decision to be made by the person to integrate the information into the long-term belief system that guides the individual's behavior.