Social marketing, the key for dealing with social pathology especially alcohol and substance abuse

Social marketing tries to affect the social behavior of the target audience in a way that is beneficial to the society and has wide use in international health programs such as dealing with alcohol and substance abuse. Therefore, the current study aimed to introduce a social marketing model developed for dealing with alcohol and substance abuse. This study uses review method by searching main keywords in credible scientific websites, books, research articles, scientific projects and dissertations. The main keywords included social marketing, social pathology, alcohol abuse and substance abuse, which were used separately and together. Main investigated websites included Web of Science, PubMed and Science direct websites. Afterwards the abstract and full texts of the gathered articles were investigated and unrelated articles were eliminated. The gathered data were then categorized and reported. Based on the results of this study, an effective strategy for dealing with alcohol and substance abuse needs to go through several stages, including product (including physical and virtual), cost (including the cost of methods used), place (the ways information can reach the audience), advertisement (notification methods), the availability of target audience, cooperation (by related people and organizations), political aspects (political fight against alcohol and substance abuse), public aspects (gathering humanitarian aids) and finally evaluation and implementation of the strategy. Selecting the behavior that needs to change, careful planning and cohesion of the aforementioned stages along with careful evaluation and implementation can help change undesirable behaviors and introduction of desirable ones. However, any strategy needs to change the attitude, awareness an behavior of the target audience in order to achieve the desirable results.