Social marketing: an application to the behaviour of breastfeeding

This is a summary of a PhD Thesis under the title “Marketing social: uma aplicação ao comportamento do aleitamento materno” (or “Social marketing: an application to the behaviour of breastfeeding”) that was supervised by the professors Arminda Paço and Ricardo Rodrigues, and defended by the author on October 15th, 2012, at the Department of Business and Economics, at University of Beira Interior, Covilhã, Portugal. Based on existing models in the literature and in order to achieve the objectives defined, between 2010 and 2012, a qualitative quantitative sequential research was conducted within the scope of social marketing to promote the individual behaviour change. The qualitative research developed a new model for analysing the mother’s intention regarding breastfeeding. In addition, to determine the significance of the agents and the variables that exert influence on the change, the quantitative research assessed the explained variance aimed at estimating the relevance of the predictive ability of the model. The most relevant contribution was the discovery of self-esteem as a significant variable for the attitude and the intention.