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Rescue Social Change Group

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by Celene Adams

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At 23, Jeff Jordan looks like he lives the healthy life he promotes in his public education campaigns. Trim and full of energy, Jordan is founder and president of Rescue Social Change Group (RSCG), a 6-year-old for-profit firm that provides research, marketing and “social change management.”

RSCG’s “motto is social change,” Jordan explains. “We hope to prove there’s a different model for social change – not through media, but through culture.”

Just what does Jordan want to change and how does he intend to do so?

Currently, the young marketing “genius,” as some have called him, is focused on improving public health – specifically youth health and the health of young GLBTs, and his experiential approach to marketing health as a way of life is creating a stir: Since Jordan launched RSCG in 2001, 31 public health organizations across country have hired him to apply his method of “social branding” to their youth communities.

Jordan’s written a book about social branding, describing his theories about marketing through cultural experience rather than via conventional media. As his book, The Social Branding Dogma, explains, social branding is a process of associating positive behaviors with desired identity.

Advertisers have been selling product by appealing to people’s desire to feel independent or to feel sexy or to fit in for years, Jordan writes, citing how Virginia Slims established its brand of cigarettes by associating women’s independence with smoking them.

RSCG essentially does the same thing, but associates healthy behaviors with the consumer’s desired identity. Kids go to parties to have fun, be “cool” and fit in – all of which they associate with smoking and drinking. But if you can get them to associate having fun, being cool and fitting in with non-smoking and non-drinking then you’ve satisfied the feeling they went to cigarettes for initially, he says.

How? That’s where RSCG’s 20 employee team of “hip-hop culture specialists, experiential brand engineers, and social network assistants,” comes in. RSCG staff study youth subcultures, such as hip-hop, rap, or GLBT, and infiltrate them to find the “biggest partyer” in town. Then they convince that person to host no-alcohol, no-drug, no-smoke parties. Even if the kid returns to drinking and smoking, other kids have come to associate having fun and being cool with being smoke and alcohol free, Jordan says. “They come to identify with the brand, because it threw the best party.”

The Southern Nevada Health Department (SNHD) hires RSCG regularly to host such shindigs and to produce public education campaigns, says Malcolm Ahlo, an SNHD program director.

“In a 2005 survey, we found that the smoking rate for gays [not including lesbians] in Las Vegas is 60 percent. In the [straight] population it’s 24 percent. Jeff [Jordan] said we have to … provide an environment where both gays and lesbians can have fun in a smoke-free environment. So we went to nightclubs and got them to host a smoke-free night, and we tried to make it the coolest event, because gay people assume that smoking is a part of them.”

RSCG also launched a print media campaign targeting GLBT youth. The campaign won a Davey Award for its “ironically sexual” content, which includes colorful images of young people fixing furniture or sucking popsicles, alongside captions reading: “Screw better,” and “Taste better.”

SNHD won’t release campaign results until next March, but Ahlo says similar campaigns RSCG has conducted for the Southern Nevada straight community since 2001 have lowered the smoking rate from 33 percent to 18 percent. He adds, however, that he doesn’t expect the GLBT campaign to have had as significant an effect, given that “smoking is so much a part of GLBT culture.”

GLBT youth is at “huge risk” Jordan says. “This is an opportunity for us to take a social approach and define what a social, active, healthy gay youth is today.”

But public health isn’t the only issue dear to Jordan’s heart. Eventually he foresees applying his social branding concepts to other issues, such as environmentalism and racism. “We’d be happy to work [in other areas]. But there’s not as much funding, because society has a price tag for health care,” he says.

The U.S. Small Business Administration recently named Jordan San Diego’s Young Entrepreneur of the Year, and in 2005 it elected him Young Entrepreneur of the Year for Rhode Island and New England. But despite being something of a wunderkind, Jordan’s success has not transpired overnight. The young man, who now sits behind a massive desk in his suite of offices above the Spreckels Theatre on Broadway Avenue., grew up as the son of first-generation Peruvian immigrants, whose early life in the United States was characterized by constant financial struggle. Yet he became known at a very young age as a “wheeler dealer” in his Miami neighborhood. By the time he was a sophomore in high school, he was vice president of the local chapter of Future Business Leaders of America, a position he followed by becoming president in his senior year, before pursuing a degree in marketing on a full scholarship.

Today, besides running his $1.2 million per year company, with two U.S. office locations and another soon to open, Jordan also has the energy to be an experiential psychology Ph.D. student at UCSD.

“And I sometimes host parties of my own,” Jeff says – non-smoking, non-drinking parties of course.