Customer Success Playbook S3 E44 - Cairo Marsh - Building Cross-Cultural Customer Connections That Stick

In this midweek edition of the Customer Success Playbook, Cairo Marsh returns to the mic to explore the layered world of empathetic marketing across cultures. From the Bronx to Tokyo, Cairo's lived experience adds a global lens to his practical insights on designing connection-first marketing strategies. He unpacks how empathy drives retention, not just acquisition, and reveals a three-tiered framework for building brand relationships based on product, brand identity, and social capital.

Detailed Analysis: Cairo Marsh is back for part two, and the conversation dives even deeper. What begins as a lighthearted exchange about food adventures in Tokyo quickly transforms into a tactical discussion on what it means to build marketing strategies that resonate across diverse cultural contexts.

The heart of this episode lies in Cairo’s model of connection:

• Functional (product value)
• Emotional (brand resonance)
• Social (status or identity alignment)

By structuring messaging and experiences around these layers, brands can meet customers where they are—geographically and emotionally. Cairo shares how this model works globally, with examples from his own bi-continental agency experience.

But Cairo doesn’t stop at strategy. He addresses the million-dollar question: how do you measure the impact of empathy? His answer is both practical and powerful: combine transactional data with perceptual insights to understand not just what customers do, but why they do it. That "why," he argues, is the leading indicator of business success.

Crucially, the episode draws a bridge between marketing and customer success. Cairo emphasizes that empathy shouldn’t end at conversion. It's the glue that holds the entire post-sale journey together—retention, loyalty, and advocacy all benefit when brands treat customers like humans, not just metrics.

This conversation is a masterclass in global customer connection and a blueprint for embedding empathy across every phase of the customer journey. It’s also a prelude to the next episode, where Cairo returns to unpack how AI fits into the empathy equation.

Now you can interact with us directly by leaving a voice message at https://www.speakpipe.com/CustomerSuccessPlaybook

Check out https://funnelstory.ai/ for more details about Funnelstory. You can also check out our full video review of the product on YouTube at https://youtu.be/4jChYZBVz2Y.

Please Like, Comment, Share and Subscribe.

You can also find the CS Playbook Podcast:
YouTube - @CustomerSuccessPlaybookPodcast
Twitter - @CS_Playbook

You can find Kevin at:
Metzgerbusiness.com - Kevin's person web site
Kevin Metzger on Linked In.

You can find Roman at:
Roman Trebon on Linked In.

Transcript

0:05

Customer success. Hello and welcome back to the Customer Success Playbook podcast. I'm Kevin Metzger here with my co-host Roman Reba. This is our Wednesday show and we're talking again with Cairo Marsh from Relative Roman. Excited to get going on Wednesday's show. Cairo's back, and we're gonna tackle our one big question here, Kenneth, but before we do, we got a couple, uh, questions for Cairo. Really, really interesting guy. He's been all over the place. Cairo, our audience may not know, but you, you're from the Bronx, you lived in Tokyo. What brought you all the way from the Bronx to Tokyo? How does that happen? Uh, the food, the food in Tokyo is much better. Nah, I, I look, I think, I think I've always been. Fortunate enough to be, you know, growing up in New York, you get exposed to all different types of cultures and things like that. That's the beauty of New York, right there is, you know, you, you can, you can be in a neighborhood, but you're still in the, the mosaic of the city where you're interacting with everybody. So I've always had a different curiosity for travel and, and things like that, and I was fortunate enough to spin. First, like three months in Peru. And then that really made me wanna live overseas. And then I followed that immediately with a trip to Japan for a friend's wedding. Um, and I just found Japan so fascinating. So at that point I was geared up to live somewhere internationally. I went over to Japan. And Japan is again, it's not, um. It's not even, I, I always describe it. I didn't like it. I didn't go there and go, I love it. It's so easy. It was like, I went over there, I'm like, what's going on? Like, what did I just, it was, it was a riddle I needed to figure out, do you know what I mean? Because it's so, it's so nuanced and different than, than, than it is here in the us And that was just something that sort of stuck with me. And then a couple years later, I had the opportunity to make a move and, and got a job at an agency out in, uh, in Tokyo, and then eventually started my own. But you split time living between Japan and, and New York these days, right? Yeah, just recently. The last, the last year and a half. I go back and forth between the US and, uh, and Tokyo. We also have an office here in the US that I'm trying to grow. We have an office in Tokyo. We also have one in, uh, uh, Taipei that we just launched recently. So I, I, I don't, I don't sleep very well. I'm usually jet lagged, but it's all good. Awesome. And so if we were visiting Tokyo, you, you moved there for the food. What, what do you recommend? What do we have to try? Well, it depends how adventurous you are, my friend. Um, it depends how adventurous you are. Like I, honestly, I think all the food, the food quality's incredible, but I, you know, I've been out there and I've had just a whole meal where everything was raw beef, right? It's things you wouldn't really, you know, normally eat here and not just like one dish. I mean, every dish, like after a while you're like, are they gonna cook anything? Like, no, they're not. It's just, it's what it's. Um, and, and it was delicious. Amazing. I've had, you know, you can eat, it's the only place in the world I would ever eat raw chicken. I've eaten raw chicken out there. You would never eat raw chicken in, in the US because Yeah. You know, whatever. But, um, but yeah, the food quality is just amazing. Honestly, you can't go wrong if you're, if you're less adventurous, you know, the, the, the. The, the staples of like teppanyaki or, or yakitori, which are basically grilled foods and you can get whatever you want. Sometimes it'll be vegetables, sometimes it'll be seafood. It's in a teki setting. It's absolutely amazing. But you really can't go wrong. You really can't go wrong. I. I love it. I Okay. We, we have another food question, but it's too close to dinner. Kyra, I gotta get outta these food questions. You're from New York. You, you a Nick's fan? Yankees fan Giants fan. You got a team? Who's your New York team here? Uh, you, you're putting me on the spot. New Yorkers will hate me for this. So, so, and I'm gonna blame my dad, right? So my dad. My dad didn't follow sports, so he did not teach me New York cultural sports values. So I had to discover on my own and I discovered random things. So I'm a, I'm a Yankee fan. That's my one New York team,'cause they're from the Bronx, but I'm a Philadelphia 76 ERs fan and a Dallas Cowboys fan. So, you know, I'm, I'm not, I'm not the best New York fan. A glutton for punishment on those other teams, but at least you got Yankee. Yankee win some. So this. Yeah, definitely. So, Cairo, here's a big question. Yeah. How can brands use empathy and value as a driver to design marketing strategies that truly resonate with the audiences across diverse regions and cultures? Yeah. There's like four questions in there. I feel like I could decon, I can deconstruct those. Exactly. But, but like, like, to start, I think, I think the way that you use empathy to drive sort of relationships and, and business outcomes, one of the things that we focus on is sort of connection, right? So a lot of times I think we, we, we may think about what's the, what's the sales proposition or what's our key message, whatever. What we try to design strategies around is what will both. What will the brand and the consumer connect around? Will they see that sort of eye to eye and that that's the point of, of relationship building. Like, oh, we have that in common. You know, where you, where you have that point of, of, of empathy. Um, and those connection opportunities start we think, at three different levels, like once basically about the product. So what are you gonna connect on around the product? What are we offering you that you actually need at a very functional level? And that's the starting point. The next part is around the brand, or why do we do it in a way that actually appeals to you so that you feel like a connection with us and our way of working overall. And the third level is really at a social level that says, why this being affiliated with us as a brand? Add social capital, social currency to what you do. So you have a sense of pride in being part of a, of being a customer of ours. So. When we think about how do you structure communications to build relationships, it's really through those three connection points that create that, that what we believe is a, a, a, a real, um, differentiator. How the consumer starts to feel about a brand or a product. I. Hey, Kyro, how do you, if a company starts to shift towards this and they, they're trying to be more empathetic, empathetic and, and drive, you know, really focused on the value to the end, end customers, how do you measure any of this? Like, how do you know if it's working? How do you know if if what you're doing is actually delivering value? It's actually empathetic. Like, I always am curious, I'm not a marketing guy, so I'm always curious Yeah. How marketers, uh, measure this stuff. Uh, you know, half the time I wonder what. How people measure a lot of things. So I think it's a good question. I think it's a good question. No, I, I think, I think on a couple those, look at the end of the day, it's, it's very interesting right? And I, and I say this all the time, like, I don't expect clients to us who believe everything that we believe. If you're, if you're a client and you got quarterly sales to make, you got quarterly sales to make, right? So what you need to believe in is whether you hit your targets, whether you're getting, you know, return on, on your investment. You know, like that's the fundamental KPIs. It has to work at a business level, not necessarily a, a, a performance level. Now, what we found. Is that by building stronger relationships, you, it tends to win hats, overall business performance. Now, the reason that does it is'cause it, it, it bakes in sort of loyalty. It lowers your cost to actually bring people back once they connect with you. The way that we measure that is we, we look at it a couple of different ways. You have transactional data, sales available data that we try to couple them with survey data that allows us to understand why are people actually connecting you with you? What audiences are connecting with you? How are you changing the difference in connection for your audience versus how your audience perceives your competitors? And we start to see Deltas rise in how people perceive you and your competitors. That tends to be a lending na le, a leading indicator of of, of sales and business performance. So Kyra, we, you know, our podcast title, right? Customer Success Playbook, and we're talk about customer success and a lot of times it's kind of post, it's post-sales, right? Uh, sure. Support of the customer. Do you see a play in between empathy processes, the post-sales and reten customer retention? And you mentioned, you mentioned the lower end cost. Do you see ways of that playing in together? I, I think, how do you say customer retention? Like, so my, my career started in, in, in customer retention. The, uh, I told you guys previously that I had worked at a, um, a small marketing company in New Jersey where I got my start. That was a purely retention based marketing company. So a lot of my philosophies in our approach take into account retention and the importance of that. I think that. When you sell people, right, and I think you can easily sell people in a transactional way, and sometimes it may feel more efficient. You do that by discounting. You do that by whatever method to get a selling. What that doesn't do is lead to sort of that ongoing relationship and retain behavior that you actually want. I think when you work through the lens of. Empathy or relationships. What that does is that creates a difference in how people want to continue to engage with you and why they continue to engage you. And that should play out though, that should play out in your post sales communications as well. Like we look at this not from a a, like one of the things that we try to define ourselves as is, is. Being focused on customer experience as a whole, not just on the upfront acquisition or on the retention, but how do you really look at that sort of holistically now when you work at every different touchpoint? At, at the, at the call center, when I go check out things online, at the website, and that helps fuel a sense of, wow, these people actually care about me. They get me. They, they're trying to understand and align it that makes all the difference in the world. Kyro, you're coming back on Friday, right? So we got you for two shows. You're coming back for the third. To wrap this up, Friday is our, uh, AI Friday, where we talk about the artificial intelligence plays. So we're gonna, we're gonna talk about how AI impacts this whole conversation, right? In sentiment analysis and automated interactions actually make marketing more empathetic. Is there a risk of lo losing that human touch? Kyra, I'm, I'm excited to dive in and see what you think about AI and what the impact that's gonna have. So am I. Our audience makes sure you subscribe like the show. Uh, we really appreciate you listening. You'll get the notification so when the AI show comes out Friday, you're, you'll get a little notification on your phone. Listen to it, share it with your friends and colleagues. We really appreciate it. And as always, Kevin, keep on playing.