5. Discussion and conclusions
By identifying good connections between treatments and motives, a social marketer might check how a
mother’s desire is attended to by policy makers. In addition, it’s important to point to which need is
influencing each motive by means of taking into account the specific relationship established between
needs and motives. Based on all of this as it is laid out in Figure 1, practical implications might be
suggested so that the social marketer puts forward actions to enrich well connected treatments considering
the generated motives and their originating and corresponding need.
Similarly, as it is presented in Table 1, a social marketer should be aware of where, when and who its
target is in terms of socio-demographic and situational characteristics. Finally, a social marketer needs to
consider the level of agreement and involvement with breastfeeding in the breastfeeding mothers’ target
so that the implemented techniques can optimise its application (DiGirolamo et al. 2001).
On the above basis, the following actions are proposed:
- As long as social influence and information are key variables to breastfeeding, grandmothers
and mothers’ partners who obviously belong to the same breastfeeding mothers’ social circle
might play a blockleader role in affective persuasion. This blockleader is called for providing
emotional support and information related to medical staff expertise.
- Prompting messages should be spread throughout the hospital in the form of stickers to be
taken back to mother’s homes. The hospital prompt might remind the importance of practicing
breastfeeding on demand. These stickers’ messages might help to remind mothers of information
related to how healthy, how cheap and how important breastfeeding is for the baby’s
development at home.
- As work support policies are very influential, social marketers might set out objectives to be
accomplished by the companies which mothers work for in order to maintain the desired conduct
within this work atmosphere. To fix the objective levels, social marketers might weight them
depending on the age and education intervals described above so that objectives can be
challenging.
- Taking into account breastfeeding connected with internal motives like duty and bond the
mothers might be called for signing a symbolic letter of commitment whose words should evoke
these intrinsic values. In this sense, the social marketer would be demanding internal coherence
and consistency.
With regard to the competition analysis, what should be done is benchmarking the treatment implemented
by bottled milk so that it develops a much better way to meet mothers’ reasons. Of course, any action
needs to take into account the active need related to each motive connected to each treatment so that the
social marketer can understand the competing adoption process. To target bottled milk mothers it’s
important to consider the socio-demographic and situational features. Finally and in order to attract the
bottle milk mothers, consequent techniques should be put forward as following:
- Raffles might be organised for the partner with direct supporting participation on mother’s breastfeeding
responses. In fact, there is a slight difference in father emotional distance perceptions between
breastfeeding partner and formula milk partner according to the positioning analysis.
- Lotteries might be organised among mothers who are able to sustain breastfeeding until the weaning
age, mainly where there are more people between 26 and 30 years old in rural areas and working in cities.
- Peripheral routes of persuasion should be implemented to highlight the importance of breastfeeding and
to defend one position against commercials by private companies so that the value of being independent
from profit marketing campaigns can be appreciated. These peripheral routes of approach should be as
highly diversified as possible given that formula milk information is predominant according to mothers
positioning analysis.
- Feedback on child development in terms of weight and size is very important to make mothers more
confident about the exact dosage provided. Then it should be recommended that mothers have measuring
instruments or devises to check these issues in their babies at home.
- As bottled milk is less prestigious than breastfeeding, social marketing might take advantage of this
competitors’ Achilles heel by pointing to non- breastfeeding mothers in public policy.