Herbert E. Krugman was the manager of corporate public opinion research at General Electric. He was both a practitioner and an academic. He received his Ph.D from Columbia University.

Krugman's initial research concerned the differences between television and print media. He found that television, unlike print media, did not allow the viewer to fully comprehend the advertising message. In spite of this fact, television ads increased brand preference.
It is important to mention here that until Krugman's research, it was commonly believed that attitudes developed prior to behavior. This is addressed at greater length in the next section. In his landmark paper, The Impact of Television Advertising: Learning Without Involvement, Krugman (1965) posited that an alternative model of consumer behavior takes place when the consumer was not involved in the message.

According to Krugman's low-involvement theory, when people view advertising without thinking about it, they do not fully consider or process the message of the ad. There is no significant attitude change. However, advertising can influence consumer decision-making without conscious awareness. Repeated exposure to advertising can lead to changes in the perceptions of what is important about a brand without the conscious or verbal recognition on the consumer's part. This can also be considered in terms of top-of-mind awareness. Repeated exposure to advertising creates top-of-mind awareness. The consumer holds no opinion of the brand until he or she recognizes it in the store and decides to buy it. Only after trial is an attitude formed.

According to Krugman (1977), "low-involvement theory seemed to challenge the rule of reason and to confirm the idiocy of the so-called 'boob tube' and perhaps even advertising".

No doubt Krugman's concept went against the conventional wisdom of the day. It was believed that consumers sought out information that concerned them, and screened out messages that were not relevant. Krugman suggested that the message was neither screened out nor actively processed, but shifted to long-term memory where an unconscious brand image was formed (Harris, 1987).

In subsequent research, Michael L. Ray supported Krugman's concept. Ray found that in low-involvement situations ads did not lead to attitude change, but seemed to lead to trial simply due to top-of-mind awareness (Batra et al, 1996). Ray conducted research in the determinants of low involvement and worked to develop a classification framework for predicting situations of high or low involvement (Harris, 1987). Ray's work raised numerous questions which led to more interest in the subject. What was involvement? Was it dichotomous: either high or low? As is often the case, the more questions raised the harder it seems to maintain a clear picture of the concept.

Let us consider the model of low-involvement consumer behavior in greater detail.