The Four C’s of Brand Growth With Jake Ahles

Jake Ahles is the Founder and Creative Director at Morel Creative, a creative agency that helps purpose‑driven food, beverage, and CPG brands grow through strategic storytelling and visual content strategy. He also co-founded The FareTrade, a CPG curation subscription box that highlighted conscious brands. Jake brings firsthand experience in brand growth and creative execution, having helped brands secure shelf space, win investment, and build memorable narratives. He guides clients in turning brand DNA into content that resonates across audiences.

Here’s a glimpse of what you’ll learn:

[1:45] Jake Ahles introduces Morel Creative and his work helping food, beverage, and CPG brands stand out
[3:23] The Four C’s framework — cohesion, clarity, consistency, connection — and how Jake uses it for storytelling
[5:54] Common mistakes brands make, from overemphasizing facts to neglecting emotional connection
[8:32] How Jake’s FEED framework translates brand DNA into narrative pillars and the storytelling cookbook
[15:22] Case study: Jake shares Gardens campaign strategy, creative approach, and 700% sell-through impact
[26:41] Why Jake sees AI as a helpful tool for content creation and workflow
[31:51] How Jake encourages brands to audit content, focus on ideal consumers, and refine messaging for clarity

In this episode…

Growth in the food and beverage space isn’t just about flashy campaigns or going viral — it’s about telling a story that resonates with both consumers and the buyers who put products on shelves. Many brands struggle to clarify their message across different channels or fail to connect emotionally with their audience. How can businesses craft a cohesive brand story that truly drives results?

Jake Ahles, an expert in brand storytelling and creative strategy, explains that the key lies in the Four C’s: clarity, cohesion, consistency, and connection. He emphasizes focusing on the emotional core of a brand rather than just listing product features. Jake also recommends auditing existing content to ensure it speaks directly to the ideal consumer and using frameworks to turn brand DNA into actionable storytelling. By applying these principles, brands can strengthen messaging, improve engagement, and increase shelf impact.

In this episode of The Missing Ingredient, CJ Bruce chats with Jake Ahles, Founder and Creative Director of Morel Creative, to discuss why cohesive storytelling drives brand growth. Jake shares insights on the Four C’s framework, how to avoid common brand mistakes, and strategies for connecting with buyers and consumers. He also touches on using AI thoughtfully and auditing content to refine messaging.

Resources mentioned in this episode:

Quotable Moments:

“Set your brand apart in the marketplace, and how can we translate that into a storytelling ecosystem?”
“Another part of clarity is being clear on how does your product actually benefit your end user.”
“How do you form an emotional connection between your product and the buyer who’s actually using your product?”
“The foundational work of figuring out really what your storytelling strategy is, is what’s going to lead to sales and growth and scalability.”
“As you know, a lot of what we do is video and photo content creation.”

Action Steps:

Audit your current brand content: Reviewing all content ensures your messaging aligns with your ideal consumer and your brand story.
Define your ideal consumer clearly: Understanding who your product serves helps craft content that resonates and drives engagement.
Focus on emotional connections: Highlighting how your product benefits the consumer fosters loyalty beyond just sharing product facts.
Create a storytelling ecosystem: Consistent messaging across social, retail, and investor touchpoints strengthens brand recognition and credibility.
Update your storytelling assets continuously: Keeping materials fresh ensures relevance and supports sales, marketing, and investor communications.

This episode is sponsored by The Missing Ingredient, a food and beverage marketing agency that believes a better future starts with food. They partner with purpose-driven brands to drive growth through smart, results-focused marketing — without the “set it and forget it” approach.

From brand awareness and paid media to content, influencer partnerships, and loyalty programs, they act as true strategic partners invested in your long-term success.

To learn more about how they help food and beverage brands grow with impact, visit themissingingredient.com today.

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Full Transcript

Introduction and Guest Background

Intro: 00:01

Welcome to The Missing Ingredient with CJ Bruce, where food and beverage founders, operators, and experts share the real strategies behind building successful brands. Let’s jump into today’s show.

CJ Bruce: 00:15

Hey, I’m CJ Bruce and welcome to the show. This is the podcast where founders and leaders of high impact food and beverage brands who are serious about scaling. Each episode, I sit down with the people who power the food and beverage industry brand operators, agencies, vendors, creators, and retailers to uncomplicate the strategies that take brands from early traction to serious scale.

This episode is sponsored by The Missing Ingredient, a food and beverage marketing agency. With over a decade in the industry, we take a different approach, starting with your business goals, looking at the full picture, and building a marketing strategy that actually ties back to growth. From content performance marketing to influencer partnerships and AI powered workflows. We’re an extension of your team, not just another vendor. Learn more at themissingingredient.com.

And before I introduce today’s guest, I want to give a shout out to the Network, which is how I got connected with our guests today. They’re the largest membership community for conscious companies in the natural products industry. You can check out their website and find your local chapter at network.org.

Now for today’s guest, Jake Ahles is the Founder of Morel Creative, where he translates food and beverage, CPG and sustainable brand stories into more shelf space, higher sell through and closed funding rounds. A former CPG founder himself, Jake, co-founded The FareTrade before pivoting to the other side of the problem, building the visual systems and brand films that help honest brands compete and win. He’s based in Los Angeles and works with natural and sustainable brands at key inflection points who are ready to own their story. Welcome to the show, Jake.

Jake Ahles: 01:45

Hey, Jake, great to be here.

CJ Bruce: 01:48

All right, so I want to jump into something on your website where you call it being a social second agency when you kind of talk about, you know, creative and production as compared to social first agencies. So could you tell us a little bit about that? And you know, how how your approach is a little bit different than a lot of what’s out there?

Jake Ahles: 02:08

Yeah, totally. And you know, it’s a very intentional call out. You know, a lot of times when we start having conversations with brands, they ask us if we can help them with their social media. And social media certainly has its place in the ecosystem. But we like to do is take a step back and focus on what are the elements of your brand story that really set you apart.

Set your brand apart in the marketplace, and how can we translate that into a storytelling ecosystem that speaks to not just social media users, but to actual buyers at retail, to potential investors, as well as to end user consumers. So yeah, obviously social media has its place, but it’s not. It’s not the first place we recommend a brand goes.

CJ Bruce: 03:00

Yeah, that makes sense. You got starting with like, you know, where what are those business objectives and like, what’s actually going to move the needle and getting that core core story down. So moving into, you know, how, how you kind of develop this story and content. Could you tell us a little bit about the Four C’s framework and how that came about? And yeah, how you approach that?

The Four C’s Framework for Storytelling

Jake Ahles: 03:23

Yeah. So the Four C’s, it’s really kind of the guiding principles that we use as our kind of guiding light as we’re creating storytelling ecosystems for brands and it’s cohesion, clarity, consistency, and connection. So, you know, ecosystem, right? You want it to be cohesive. You want it to be able to speak to, again, wherever, whatever touchpoints your brand has, whether you’re trying to get into retail, whether you’re going to see whether you’re focusing on website or maybe a fair or other type of Thrive Market type of situation.

But across all those touch points, you want consistency in your brand message so that if whether a brand finds you on social media, comes to your website, sees you on store, brand message is consistent across all those touch points. Obviously you want your message to be clear so someone understands it quickly and understands what your brand is without having to try and work to figure it out. Another part of clarity is being clear on how does your product actually benefit your end user. Whether that’s helping them achieve an aspiration in their life or how does it help them solve a problem? So we noticed a lot of times brands focus on just kind of the facts of their product.

Like, you know, we don’t use seed oils. Like that’s great and that’s important, but what is the actual benefit of your product to a user of your product? And then connection Is, in my opinion, probably the biggest one that I see brands miss a lot of times. Again, oftentimes focusing more on the facts. But how do you form an emotional connection between your product and the buyer who’s actually using your product?

Nice.

CJ Bruce: 05:16

That’s great. Yeah, all super important pieces. And it’s like, it’s, it’s core, core to the, you know, to, to telling your story no matter what channel you’re on, right, or how you’re doing it. And that’s great. I think.

Could you maybe dig into, you know, some examples within in food and beverage? Like do you see mistakes that, you know, merging food and beverage brands or brands that you’ve talked to or had conversations with are making with their, you know, their visual identity and content? You touched on it a little bit with, you know, they’re talking about the features and not the end user benefits, but are there any other, you know, common mistakes that you see?

Common Mistakes in Food & Beverage Branding

Jake Ahles: 05:54

Oh. You know, really the biggest one I think is are the most prevalent is brand’s leading with the facts that they think are what differentiates their brand. So, you know, part of the work we do with brands is there’s a workshop as part of a framework that we go through with brands. And the first step is a is a framework. So it’s really drilling down into what are those ingredients that make up your brand’s DNA? And yeah, the facts are part of it, but how do we pull out the emotional core of your brand mistakes?

I suppose I see brands making. Again, I kind of touched on this earlier, but is relying kind of on social media too much or like user generated content to build a brand at the beginning. Especially with user generated content, right? You’re oftentimes relying on other people to tell your story for you instead of having control over what your brand story is, which just kind of adds to the confusion. So I guess that kind of comes back to a mistake being not really knowing what your brand foundation is from a storytelling standpoint.

Does that make any sense at all?

CJ Bruce: 07:12

Yeah, no, I think it’s I think it does. I think it does. I think it’s, you know, say it back. I think thinking about kind of jumping the gun and going straight to UGC or straight to influencers that would be telling your story for you without having that solid foundation. And I think it’s, I think it’s something we see to our clients will jump straight to, you know, a tactical execution piece, right?

Or maybe they’ve seen people do it or they think they need to be there, but not understanding the strategy behind it and the, you know, the goals and objectives from a business perspective behind it before you jump there. Yeah, yeah, I.

Jake Ahles: 07:41

Think that’s that’s another that kind of leads to another kind of mistake, right? Is that oftentimes brands don’t want to invest in figuring out what that story is thinking. Oh, we’ll figure it out later. Let’s just try and get into some stores or try to sell some product at the beginning, but the foundational work of figuring out really what your storytelling strategy is, is what’s going to lead to sales and growth and scalability.

The FEED Framework and Storytelling Cookbook

CJ Bruce: 08:10

Totally. That makes sense. You touched on this briefly, the in terms of your framework. So the, the FEED framework, I’m saying that correctly.

Jake Ahles: 08:20

Yeah. Framework with Es.

CJ Bruce: 08:23

Awesome. With three E’s. Yeah. The extra e. Can you talk a little bit about, you know, what that is and, and how it, you know, how it affects your work and your work with brands?

Jake Ahles: 08:32

Yeah. So the framework is, is again, the framework that I mentioned earlier, and it’s three E’s because the feed is an acronym for the ingredients that make up a brand’s DNA, which is facts, education, emotion, entertainment, and then those kind of combined to create your differentiation. So it starts with kind of that deep dive workshop, which we call the Forge Workshop, which is really where we sit down over a few hours with the key brand. Decision makers to really pull out what are those key ingredients that make up your brand? We often get told it feels like going to brand therapy.

And then from there, the rest of the framework is all based upon the foundation that comes out of that workshop. So we then build what we call a storytelling cookbook, which is similar to like a brand guide, but really specific to the narrative pillars of your story. So how do we translate those ingredients into retailer materials, into your website, into social media strategy, etcetera, etcetera. Depending on what your goals are, it could be investor decks, for instance. And then from there, it’s kind of executing on those various pillars that come out of the storytelling cookbook, right?

So making the recipes from the cookbook, essentially.

CJ Bruce: 09:58

Nice. Yeah, I would just, I would add, like the, you know, from where we sit, a lot of on the execution side of, you know, the go to market pieces and having this stuff in place is so critical and really makes everything else that comes after it, makes it move faster, makes it more focused, feels like it’s all, you know, speaking the same language, both, you know, from the brand, but also like we talked about earlier from influencers or your customers.

Jake Ahles: 10:23

Exactly. Yeah.

CJ Bruce: 10:24

So yeah, that’s great. I wanted to shift a little bit to talk about the, you know, the communication with buyers and distributors. So I know you’ve talked about how, you know, a lot of people are focusing on telling the story to their consumers, but they’re not always the people who decide, you know, not the people who are deciding the shelf space. Right? And so I’m curious, you know, how do you think about, you know, speaking the telling the story to buyers and distributors?

And also this kind of connects to what you said earlier about, you know, what’s actually your, your objectives as a brand, right? And it might seem flashy on social media, but how do you approach those stories to buyers and distributors, and how do you think about that differently than consumers?

Jake Ahles: 11:04

Yeah, I mean, I think that’s a lot of times a mistake. Another going back to mistakes brands make is, you know, oftentimes we’ll work with a brand that’s trying to expand their retail presence and they’ll share, for instance, like their deck. And it’s all just metrics and numbers, which is great. And it’s important. Obviously, you need to have it in there.

But when a broker, when you’re no longer in the room with the buyers at a Whole Foods or Sprouts and you’re relying on your broker to sell you into that store, how, what are you giving the broker to essentially put you in the room with them? And your brand story is a big part of that. So whether you’re relying on a deck, how do you infuse your story into the deck to show how your brand is more meaningful to a potential buyer that will move your product off the shelf. You know, increase velocity or sell through. But then also something we do with a lot of brands is creating what we call a media library.

So yeah, the broker can go in and talk about your brand, maybe leave a deck behind, but then giving them a library of follow up material, whether that’s brand films or other pieces of content about your brand that the broker can use to follow up with buyers at these big retailers or that you yourself can use to see to the to the buyers after the broker or before the broker has had a meeting with them.

CJ Bruce: 12:38

Yeah.

Jake Ahles: 12:38

That’s huge. A more holistic approach rather than just being another card in the in the Rolodex of the broker’s clients.

Tactical Approach to Content Deliverables

CJ Bruce: 12:47

That’s awesome. Yeah. I’m curious just kind of on the tactical level and how you, you know, brands coming to work with you and like something like that, but also creating content for their website or content for other materials. Like do you from the beginning, you know, come up with, okay, well, what are all the different deliverables that we’re going to need for these different audiences to then produce all of that at once? Or does it tend to be phased?

How do you approach it?

Jake Ahles: 13:13

It so that’s really where the storytelling cookbook kind of comes into place is we can the storytelling cookbook kind of ends up being a living sort of document. So maybe when we’re first working with the brand, they’re just doing DTC. So most of the work will, like most of the recipes in the cookbook will be or DTC related. But then it, you know, the narrative of the brand and the core pillars are in there already so that we can go back and be like, okay, how do we adapt this for retailer readiness? And then you can add more recipes into the cookbook and go from there.

CJ Bruce: 13:50

Got it. Yes. Another question on, you know, the cookbook and process there. How do you. So, you know, for brands already working with to work with the branding agency or packaging packaging agency, right. They’ve got some of the foundational work, like how, you know, if they’re not starting from scratch, how do you approach, how do you integrate those things? Or how does that complement, you know, maybe some of the work that they’ve already done?

Jake Ahles: 14:12

Yeah, I definitely say it’s more complementary than we’re not trying to reinvent the wheel or anything. It’s oftentimes we like to call kind of like second stage brands, right? They’ve already established themselves and they’re just trying to maybe go from specialty markets into national grocers. How do we take what was working well to get them the traction that they already have to then translate that into something that would be useful for the bigger national retailers? Yeah.

Oftentimes it’s looking at their packaging, it’s looking at their brand guide, taking the pieces from that to kind of inform how we move forward with the storytelling ecosystem that we built for them.

CJ Bruce: 14:55

Got it. Cool. Okay. I want to shift into specific, you know, client case study example. So we talked a little bit before we started recording about different gardens and just wanted to, you know, understand how, how you approach the project and you know, how, you know, there’s some risk involved and, you know, the creative approach. And yeah, can you just talk a little bit about that, about how you approached it, the project itself, and then maybe some of the results?

Jake Ahles: 15:22

Yeah. I mean, gardens is a really great brand. They do fresh frozen cubes of garlic and herbs and vegetables. Big fan of gardens. They’re primarily an East Coast brand, or at least they were.

But they’re in major grocery stores across the country and they’re kind of challenged when we started where we were brought in to, to do this campaign with them was really an awareness challenge. People who use the product oftentimes loved it, but didn’t really know it by name. And people who didn’t know the brand obviously weren’t really aware of it. They had a commercial and assets that they were running before, but even the people in the company thought it was bland and boring and vanilla. And so they wanted to kind of spice it up for the second campaign, let’s say.

So we kind of built a campaign around that insight. So. Something that would be kind of exciting and help to call back to the name. So we worked with our friends at the Y collective who are an amazing social media agency who. Kind of came up with the idea for make a Note to grab the rope.

And so we took that idea and turned it into a 32nd spot for CTV originally, which then expanded into cable. But it was all the way we approached. It was, let’s kind of wink at the audience, let them know that we know that this is a commercial that they’re watching. So we did some kind of breaking the fourth wall, put some kind of witty humor in it, or more like self-aware humor into it. And yeah, so, you know, start off with CTV and did really well on CTV.

So they expanded it to a regional broadcast campaign over 23 markets, and it helped them land into seven new retailers, including Gelson’s and Bristol Farms. I think it increased their sell through like 700% while it was running. And then we got to submit it to Cannes Lions off the success of it. So that was pretty cool.

CJ Bruce: 17:41

It was cool.

Jake Ahles: 17:42

Yeah. So yeah, pretty proud of pretty proud of that one.

CJ Bruce: 17:45

Awesome. Very cool. So when you’re working with the client and they have, you know, there’s differing opinions and there’s, you know, there’s always, and we’ve had this experience too, where they’re trying to kind of creep in either too much selling or. You know, there’s a discrepancies within their stakeholders on what direction they want it to go or a difference in, you know, what you see as like the creative opportunity and creative pathway to tell the best story, you know, how do you handle those discussions and kind of get through to the other side, you know, on that, that core creative concept and ultimately, you know, some creative assets that are in the world.

Managing Stakeholder Dynamics in Creative Work

Jake Ahles: 18:18

Like with any project, it’s balancing what you as a creative partner and either the founder or the larger team think it’s going to be the best direction for the project. And, you know, everyone obviously has their own ideas of what they think might be the best way forward. And it’s, you know, it’s really a balance, right? Is how far can you? How much can you push the brand to do something that you really believe in while staying within their mission for the project?

While still respecting what they want to bring to the table. I think a big part of it is, at least for me, is if you can have the stakeholders and the brand. You can have it’s not like convincing them that your idea is right, but it’s like if you can have the stakeholders in the brand buy into what you’re doing and be emotionally invested in it with you is going to be a much higher success rate than trying to butt heads and just saying, no, my way is the way to do it. So how can you manage that kind of dynamic between a brand? I don’t know if I have a good answer for like how I would do that necessarily, but.

It can really vary depending on the circumstance. Yeah.

CJ Bruce: 19:39

Yeah, yeah. So I want to talk about, you know, you’ve worked with brands at different stages. Sure. And so, you know, curious to talk about kind of how, you know, the approach or storytelling changes as a the brand grows. And I think there’s, you know, digging it a little bit like at the beginning, there’s obviously a founder starts the business.

There’s a lot of times, especially in food and beverage, there’s like a personal story or something that led to that, you know, that founding and then as the brand grows, evolves, it could have, you know, different product lines, different people who are managing and leading the brand, different customers. So could you talk a little bit about that? You know, how did that approach to storytelling maybe evolves or changes over time as the brand grows?

Jake Ahles: 20:22

Yeah. You know, I mean, it’s, it’s fun at every stage. You know, we worked with a brand recently called Kimito that we started working with them. They were just coming out of product development. So we really had an opportunity to really help shape the brand from the ground up in terms of the story and, and the visual approach that they were taking.

And that’s always really rewarding, right? We kind of help them go to market. We’re helping them get into their first Independent retailers. But then on the other side, there’s brands like Seedlip, where we got to work with them on various projects over several years to help them expand from really a brand that was just coming in to North America, from the UK to expanding nationwide and then getting acquired by Diageo. Yeah, like so with smaller brands like Shmita, right?

We would, you know, our workflow would be like, let’s go grab some coffee and chat about the brand and really dig out what makes up the ingredient. Think of what makes up the story for the brand. So we can really influence the brand from the ground up of where this goes versus larger brands like Seedlip or Jiro Gardens, where they’re clearly already established. They’re in, they’re in stores nationwide already. How can we take those elements and work with the brand manager or the marketing coordinator to kind of take their initiatives And make them the best they can be.

I don’t know. It’s fun at all levels, right?

Lessons from Being a Former CPG Founder

CJ Bruce: 22:01

So you talk in the opening how you know you were a former CPG founder yourself. And so can you maybe talk a little bit about how having that experience, you know, how do you bring that to the work that you do today and, and how, you know, how does that affect your day to day?

Jake Ahles: 22:19

100%? Yeah, that really informed what Morel Creative has become, right? So The FareTrade was really a CPG curation subscription box. So we were working with really hundreds of brands, small batch brands that you would find, you know, like an expo West or a fancy food show. And, you know, very specifically working with brands that were conscious brands that were really kind of, you know, the intention was to highlight the brands that were helping to shape the next generation of food.

And through that, what we saw is that there’s so many great brands out there that are struggling to tell their story in a consistent way, whether that’s because of resources or for other reasons. So. A lot of what we, you know, kind of the benefit for the brands of working with The FareTrade was we would tell their story for them. And yeah, that’s, that’s really what kind of informed what Morel Creative became, right? How can we help brands that are doing things that are like, like I say, like, we like to help brands that are better for people and planet.

So how can we. Specifically work with those brands to help them become the next products on the shelf?

CJ Bruce: 23:53

Nice. Cool. Yeah, that makes sense. Yeah, it makes total sense. Saw the opportunity.

You know, firsthand and the challenges firsthand. And then. Yeah, bring that into into Morel Creative. So we talked a little bit about, you know, what you were doing. FareTrade with, with brands.

Are there any brands that you can think of that are doing great work today that you feel like deserve more attention?

Jake Ahles: 24:15

Yeah, there’s several brands that I really love right now. One of my favorite brands is called Fable Fish. They’re a salmon jerky company out of Alaska run by Megan Lucke, who literally goes out and catches the salmon out of Alaska and turns into jerky. It’s a very kind of holistic approach that they’re taking to, to creating salmon jerky, and it’s a really stellar product. So I’m a big fan of them.

Another one is Dune Pistachios. They you may have seen them. They have incredible branding, but also a really fun product that’s, I think, elevating pistachios in a way that hasn’t been done before. And something I learned about through them about pistachios is that they’re apparently the one of the most sustainably farmed nuts. Not that the farms themselves are sustainable, but just growing pistachios takes a whole lot less water.

The trees last longer, so there’s more yield for everything. A whole lot of other things. So yeah, I think June is another really great one. Another favorite brand. And this is very much the dad in me talking is called White Leaf Provisions.

So if anyone has kids out there, you know how much kids love like juice, not juice pouches, but like smoothie pouches.

CJ Bruce: 25:42

Yeah.

Jake Ahles: 25:43

And yeah, White Leaf Provisions, they’re all regenerative farmed produce going into the their pouches. It’s all very clean. So I’m just a really big fan of the way they’re approaching it, especially when it comes to littles, right?

CJ Bruce: 26:00

Yeah. Yeah. Now that we got crushing a lot of pouches over here. Yeah. So yeah, I feel you on that.

Awesome. So another question that I’ve been asking everybody and is about AI. And so we’re, you know, heavily in AI and doing a lot of, you know, workflow optimization automations and, you know, building things out for ourselves and starting to explore how that, you know, is going to be applied to clients. And also just thinking about, obviously, it’s changing a lot of aspects of, of work and daily life. And so I’m just curious for you, you know, how is, how is the rise of AI impacted your work and the work that you do for brands?

AI in Creative Work and Workflow Optimization

Jake Ahles: 26:41

Yeah. You know, I, I like to say AI is a, is a tool. I think that it’s a great tool that would leverage correctly can be extremely useful. You know, people often ask me if I’m worried about it. As you know, a lot of what we do is video and photo content creation, right?

And am I worried about AI taking that away? Honestly, no. I think a, you have to. I think being able to know how to use AI is going to be an asset. And it’s like you mentioned, right?

It’s great for creating workflows. It’s great for fleshing out ideas. Being a sounding board. You know, like on the drone project, we did the storyboarding essentially as an AI video example of what we were going to create. To help kind of sell the concept of it, there’s another brand I worked with that they were going through a fundraising round and wanted to create a new brand video essentially, but didn’t have budget to do a whole new shoot.

So we essentially took their assets and applied some AI to it to create a new brand story using AI tools that help them close a fairly large funding round. So I think that AI can be very useful if as long as you apply it correctly and don’t just rely on it to do everything for you, right? Something I find interesting and this may shift down the line, but what I seem to be noticing right now is there’s kind of a, whether consciously or not, a pushback on AI generated content from users. You know, we’ve tested some AI content and some performance ads we were running versus non AI content and the non AI content outperform the AI content every time. So I think that’s something interesting, whether that’s just a subconscious bias against AI content right now.

Or it’s something more more meaningful.

CJ Bruce: 29:10

Yeah, that’s really interesting. I think, you know, a few things. Pick up on what you said there. I think like the, you’re obviously an expert in telling stories and, you know, getting to the core story and then telling the stories visually. And so taking that expertise and then leveraging the AI tools, you’re going to be much better at, you know, how do you mix those things together?

And I think also, it’s not all or nothing, right? Like you can take bits of real things that were, were shot and edited and then incorporate AI. And when you do it in a blended way, it can be something that’s, you know, lets you do things that you couldn’t normally do. Right. Exactly.

They can afford to shoot. So that’s something new. And then the, what you said about the, the pushback. I think that’s something else that’s interesting that, you know, we’ve been talking to a lot of people about too. And just there’s a at the same time that it’s accelerating so quickly and people are adopting it and using it, there’s this, this counterweight to people being, you know, not wanting it to be cluttering their social feeds or other channels.

And also the desire for more authentic human connection, which I think will continue to grow as the tools become more and more prevalent. But yeah, interesting times for sure.

Jake Ahles: 30:19

It is, it is indeed interesting, right? Like OpenAI just killed off Sora because it wasn’t people weren’t using it enough, which is really interesting.

CJ Bruce: 30:27

Yeah. Totally awesome. Well, I think I wanted to shift into a final question, but before I get to that, I wanted to just point people to your website. So we are morel.com. And is there anywhere else you want to point people to, to, to learn more about you or more creative?

Jake Ahles: 30:48

Yeah. I mean, the social media I’m most active on is LinkedIn, which is just my name on LinkedIn. So those are the two places to find me.

CJ Bruce: 30:59

Cool. Great. Yeah. So the last question I was going to say was, you know, giving the listeners a like a 30 day content challenge, like if people are going to go and create some content over the next 30 days, have something, you know, practical that they could, they could kind of jump on and get started themselves. What do you think?

What’s a, you know, a practice or an approach that you think would help them improve their brand story or get like more quality content out of that? Yeah. That work. So if someone listening feels like their brand is doing content but not translating to results, what’s something that you would have them fix over the next week or two, like to really focus on or hone in on to help, you know, close the gap on, let’s say, clarity to take like one of the pieces. Sure.

How could they get more clear messaging or storytelling in their content?

Jake Ahles: 31:51

Yeah. You know, depending on how they’re doing content right now, when I here doing content, I’m assuming it’s a lot of social media content. So I think that I would look at what content has been resonating with your ideal consumers. So to take a step back, have you defined what your ideal consumer is, who your ideal consumer is, and you know, what drives them in terms of like, why would they purchase your product? Again, going back to understanding why.

Or so how your product benefits that consumer. And then are you telling that story to the consumer? Are you showcasing it in a way that is obvious to the consumer? Or are you relying on the facts of your brand, whether that’s the ingredients in your brand or the process that you use to make it, or some certification that you had something like that. So I guess kind of the answer to either one of those questions is doing kind of an audit on the content that you’re already producing and really sitting down and asking yourself, is what I’m producing actually speaking to my ideal consumer, or is it just content for the sake of content?

CJ Bruce: 33:20

That’s good. That’s great. Yeah. Awesome. So we’ve been talking to Jake Ahles, Founder of Morel Creative. Be sure to check him out at we are morel.com and you can find Jake on LinkedIn. Jake, thanks so much for being on the show.

Jake Ahles: 33:34

Thanks, CJ it was a pleasure.

Outro: 33:36

Thanks for listening to The Missing Ingredient. We’ll see you again next time and be sure to click subscribe to get future episodes.