Cairo Kenan Marsh, founder of Tokyo-based marketing consultancy relativ*, explores evolving consumer loyalty trends and relationship-driven marketing strategies. Drawing from his experience with Fortune 500 companies and independent brands, Cairo discusses the shift from transactional marketing to authentic brand relationships. He shares insights on balancing data science with creativity and demonstrates how relationship-focused strategies drive successful outcomes.
Episode Transcript
Adrian Tennant: Coming up in this episode of IN CLEAR FOCUS
Cairo Kenan Marsh: Relationship design, at its core, is human. Beyond culture, humanity works the same. We have the same needs. We all need to belong. We all want to be supported. We all want to be respected. You don’t have to try to be everything to everybody. You have to be your authentic self to the people that you serve and that will actually resonate more.
Adrian Tennant: You’re listening to IN CLEAR FOCUS, fresh perspectives on marketing and advertising produced weekly by Bigeye, a strategy-led full-service creative agency growing brands for clients globally. Hello, I’m your host, Adrian Tennant, Chief Strategy Officer. Thank you for joining us. McKinsey’s 2024 State of the Consumer report reveals consumer loyalty is weakening across all demographic groups, with over a third of consumers in advanced markets actively experimenting with different brands. Older consumers, traditionally the most brand-loyal segment, are now just as likely as younger generations to switch allegiances in search of better value. With 36% of consumers planning to increase their private label purchases, the challenge for established brands isn’t just about maintaining market share. It’s about fundamentally rethinking how they build and sustain customer relationships. Today’s guest is an entrepreneur and marketing expert who’s built his business on a relationship-driven approach. Cairo Kenan Marsh is the founder and executive partner of relativ*, a Tokyo-based marketing consultancy. With over a decade of experience working with Fortune 500 companies, Cairo leads teams creating unique brand experiences that foster stronger connections between companies and their customers. Originally from the Bronx, New York, Cairo took a bold step 15 years ago when he moved to Japan, founding relativ* in 2015. Under his leadership, the company has expanded its presence across Asia, winning multiple industry awards in the process. To discuss his agency’s philosophy, I’m delighted that Cairo is joining us today from New York City. Cairo, welcome to IN CLEAR FOCUS!
Cairo Kenan Marsh: Adrian, thank you for having me on. Super excited to be here, and hopefully, I can share some information of value.
Adrian Tennant: Alright, well, let’s start with your location. Now, I’ve just said that you’re based in Tokyo. What are you doing back in New York?
Cairo Kenan Marsh: Well, I tend to go back and forth a little bit, partly for family reasons. My mom and my sister are based here in New York and they sometimes need my help. But also one of the things that we’ve been doing as a company is sort of expanding our footprint. So we’re based primarily in Tokyo, but we’ve recently opened up an entity in the US that we’re trying to grow. So when I’m here, that’s a great opportunity to do that. We’re also expanding in other parts of Asia as well.
Adrian Tennant: Excellent. What originally prompted you to move from New York to Tokyo?
Cairo Kenan Marsh: Well, there’s a multitude of factors. So I’ve worked in agencies my whole career, and I worked at an Omnicom agency in New York, and I was working there for about five years, and it was great. Very much enjoyed it. But you know, there’s a point where you hit a plateau in anyone’s career where you’re like, not in any bad way, but the next level of growth for me inside that company would have taken three to four years. And that was fair. There were some people in front of me who deserve it, at least so. But at the same time, I didn’t know where the challenge would be for me. So I started looking for challenges outside of that that would be personal. In that same sort of time horizon, I had recently been to Japan for a friend’s wedding. I found Japan to be Literally one of the most fascinating places on earth. I didn’t know if I liked it. I wasn’t like, this is ideal. This is perfect. This is me. It was more intriguing. Like what did that all mean? And I walked away with that sort of in my head constantly. And so. I was really considering a move to Japan because I felt I would be challenged by just the context, the market, the sense of trying to figure this thing out. And while I was waiting for the next step in my career, it’s a great opportunity for personal growth. So I was fortunate enough that I was able to come out to Japan. I interviewed around, I had some connections via Omnicom, who introduced me to some agencies in Japan, and I was able to get a job with an Omnicom agency in Japan. That just sort of got the ball rolling.
Adrian Tennant: What led you to then found relativ*?
Cairo Kenan Marsh: One of my dreams always, since I was a little kid, was to own my own business. Like me and my older sister, I must have been like eight and she might have been ten, we would sit back and we would plan out this company we were going to build together, right? So the idea of being my own business owner was always a goal and it was just a matter of time. Happening at the point where we started relativ*, it’s sort of that opportunity meets preparation, therefore it’s lucky sort of scenario, where we had a client, there was a conflict for the agency that I was working with. that was creating some political tensions and political tensions with the agency that was already working with this client as an incumbent because they didn’t want my previous company to be a part of that mix. There was also some disagreement in the direction between myself and my regional CEO about which way we wanted to head in Japan. So all of those sort of conspired together where I have a great opportunity now with this client. There’s a conflict with my current company can’t work with that takes away some of the pressure that this potential client was feeling from their other agency. And, you know, it creates a path where it reduces the friction between myself and my senior management at the point in time. So it all just sort of lined up really, really beautifully, really beautifully. And I was fortunate enough to have four people that I worked with at my old agency believe in me enough and believe in the idea enough to join me in that adventure. So it really, it was just a magnificent confluence of events.
Adrian Tennant: Right. And relativ* has been around for nine years now. What services do you offer, and what types of clients does relativ* typically serve?
Cairo Kenan Marsh: If you think about formats, and I say formats and the idea of digital, traditional, print, mobile, we offer everything, like we don’t really care. I wouldn’t define us though as a full service agency because we try to work from the point of view of how do we help our clients find sustainability. So we’re really looking for clients who are not just trying to get a campaign out the door or do a television commercial or build a website. We’re looking for clients who really have a clear problem around growing a segment of consumers or connecting in a different market, that we can really help them ideate and come up with solutions for that. So we focus on relationship development, relationship design for our clients to say, how can we help our clients find sustainable relationships with a particular target audience? Now, the way we execute that could be any format. That’s irrelevant. It depends on the context and the consumer need. But can we help you create a relationship advantage with a particular audience?
Adrian Tennant: Well, the agency name relativ* reflects your core philosophy about relationships being key to unlocking value. Cairo, can you elaborate on this approach and maybe explain how it differs from traditional marketing strategies?
Cairo Kenan Marsh: Sure. And I don’t want to demean typical marketing, though please forgive me if I inadvertently do! I think that a lot of marketing tends to be very, very transactional. What numbers, what KPI do I need to hit today? And that could be an awareness KPI, it could be a sales KPI, it could be any sort of KPI. But it tends to be focused on these very targeted sort of measures. The way that we tend to think of it is we want to think about the consumer as a human being first, right? And that seems very obvious, seems very basic, I know. But we try to go, OK, great. What you want as a brand is not just to sell this consumer, not just to have a thousand consumers be aware of you. You want to be able to spend your marketing dollars in a way that these consumers will look at you as a brand that’s really for them or a product for them, where you start to establish a sense of connection, where it’s not just about the transactions, the activity, the campaign, but it’s a sense of where this brand starts to fit in my life. So maybe I’ll buy from you right now for your campaign, which is obviously a need, but I’ll also start to think of you as a unique place in my life. So a month from now or two months from now, six months from now, whenever the next opportunity will be, you start to become top-of-mind.
Adrian Tennant: The word mark relativ* has an asterisk. What’s the story behind that?
Cairo Kenan Marsh: Well, the asterisk is really intended to define a sense of meaning. So, you know, if you’re reading a book and sometimes you see an asterisk next to the word, then you go down and go, what does that really mean? We really want people to know that our name isn’t the name relative because it sounds clever or cool or simple or whatever you may think the word sounds like. We really want people to go, what does it mean? Why does it mean that? And obviously, if you look at the word relative, it’s really two things that drive the definition. One is that sense of family familiarity, which is what we try to create between ourselves and our clients, and also between our clients and their consumers. And the other part is in relationship to other things. Because when you think about business growth, the type of bonds that you have, the way that you impact consumers has to be considered in relationship to your competitors and the other factors that are going on. So that asterisk is really to sort of tease or hint that there’s a deeper meaning and we hope that that prompts curiosity.
Adrian Tennant: On your website, you discuss strategy being about questions, not answers. Cairo, how does this philosophy guide your work with clients?
Cairo Kenan Marsh: I think it’s everything, right? I think the most important thing that we always challenge our clients on is what problem are we trying to solve? And that problem can be contexted in terms of opportunity. The problem is we need to make an extra $10 million. That’s a problem. Maybe that’s a positive problem, but it’s still a problem. How do I find that extra $10 million? So it really starts with what is that problem? And I think sometimes clients will tell you, well, the problem is we’re not connecting with moms. Okay, now that’s good and maybe that’s an actionable problem, but the piece about where the questions come in is, well, why? What are the drivers of that? Is that the product that you’re offering? Is that where you’re positioned? And you have to start to interrogate core problems through the lens of questions. What we tend to do is you have the main problem and what we need to solve, and then there’s a list of problem drivers, which are really subsets of questions. It says, is it about, again, what your position, the pricing, a range of different things. And once you have the answers to those problem drivers, then you go, okay, what do I need to do to overcome that pricing problem? What do I need to overcome that positioning problem? What do I have to do to overcome that competitive problem? And that forms your strategy. But if you don’t have the right questions and if you don’t really interrogate it and really come up with a range of challenging questions that challenge your own perceptions, then sometimes it’s harder to get to the right solutions.
Adrian Tennant: Got it. You’ve also written about the concept of brand-being versus brand-ing. Can you explain the difference and why it matters?
Cairo Kenan Marsh: Yeah, and please forgive me, I love cliches and brand-ing versus brand- being is one of my clever cliches, I guess. I read an article about this, it might have been Scott Galloway, the NYU professor, where he talked about the end of the age of brands. You know, because now everything’s about product, product optimization, people buy based on consumer reviews online. So, the idea of the brand is an articulation, but what you stand for is no longer as important as what the consumer sphere tells you about the actual product. Which I think is interesting. I disagree with that a bit in the sense that branding is dead that way. The idea that I could just come up and tell you this that would fly in the face of maybe consumer reality or experience reality is no longer sustainable. That might have worked in the ‘50s, ‘60s, ‘70s, ‘80s, ‘90s, but it’s increasingly hard to do that now. What brand being is thinking about how the brand actually lives and presents itself. So our brand values if we’re for athletes or if we’re for moms or if we’re for kids. Well, what do you actually do that convinces people of that experience? It’s like I can tell people I’m a nice guy and punch them in the face. I’m a nice guy. That’s my branding. My brand bean is that I punched a dude in the face. I’m actually a jerk. Ultimately, brand bean is how do you actually live and bring that position of supporting moms or supporting athletes to life? Because that’s the way that you’re going to be judged these days, not based on what you say, but what you actually do. Find an audience you serve And again, if that’s moms or athletes or kids or dads or whoever it is that you serve, once you define that, actually go ahead and serve them. Actually do things that people can see and that is your brand because that’s how your brand actually lives.
Adrian Tennant: Cairo, your company relativ* has grown pretty significantly since its founding. What are some key lessons you’ve learned about scaling while maintaining authentic relationships with both clients and employees?
Cairo Kenan Marsh: Yeah, one thing that I really found is that communication is everything, you know, and I think the more that you grow, whether it’s in your client engagements, the number of clients you’re engaging with for your own people, is that you have to wrap up that communication, probably more so than you’re wrapping up your team, right? Because there’s greater opportunities for disconnection. there’s greater opportunities for misperceptions. And I think you’ve really got to be active about combating that and putting yourself in spaces and places where you could actually talk to people directly and make sure they understand what you’re about and why you’re doing it. It’s been really an adventure when you go, wait, I’ve been doing this for five or 10 years and you guys know me, where are these misconceptions coming from? Because it happens as the organization expands. And then you realize you’re not communicating enough. You know, you’re taking it for granted that what you’ve done in the past is carrying over today. Now you got to say it, say it again, live it, do it, and really communicate it.
Adrian Tennant: I’m curious, are most of your team in office or are you remote or is this sort of a hybrid situation?
Cairo Kenan Marsh: So since the pandemic, we’ve allowed everyone to be fully remote. So before the pandemic, you could work from home one day and there was flex hours. So you didn’t have to be in the office full time, but you were expected to be in the office at least, you know, probably 20 or so hours a week during a given week. Now, since the pandemic, we like everyone, you’re free to basically be where you are and do what you do. So people tend to work fully remote. What we try to do is we still maintain our office and we try to use it, in my opinion, and I think it’s different for different industries and depending on the nature of what you’re producing in the scale of your business. But I tend to think of our office as a bit of a clubhouse in a sense that we don’t need everyone there. I don’t need to watch you type all day. I don’t need to watch you send that email. But we do need to come together and connect and make sure we’re on the same page. So we try to literally stage different events or have particular reasons to attract people to the office so we can continue to connect as a team.
Adrian Tennant: Interesting. From a strategic perspective, what process or framework do you use to guide discovery and inform market intelligence?
Cairo Kenan Marsh: There’s a few different things that we do and use. One is a diagnostic tool. When we think about relationships, we use a tool or a process that we call connectivity. Connectivity is a way to measure sort of relationship strength between brands and consumers, and it allows you to look at not just how well you’re doing, but how well you’re doing relative to your nearest competitors and against what dimensions drive that, whether that’s a tangible value in terms of efficiency, product design, is that what’s driving your relationship or is it more of an emotional sort of brand? point of view on how people perceive themselves when they use their product. So that’s a bit of a diagnostic tool that allows us to understand particularly maybe where some of the challenges are, where some of the levers are that we would begin to focus. When we think about how we solve for problems, we tend to work in a process-driven way. What I mean by that is that there’s really four steps to any particular challenge. We think it’s really making sure we have the problem definition, the resources against that problem, and the expertise and the toolkits that we can apply to. So that’s step one. It’s really getting the team together to go, well, we know what the problem is. We know what toolkits we want to apply against that problem, and we feel confident that we can solve it. Step two is really the design of that solution, which is really then about, okay, great. We have the problem. Here’s how we’re going to solve it. Here’s what those problem drivers are. Here’s what needs to be overcome, X, Y, and Z. And that gets outlined sort of as step two. And step three is really then the development of that actual solution that then gets matched back to that design and says, well, do we believe that this solution that we’ve developed matches the design we have, that matches the problem that we outline, and then we can go ahead and deploy it. We tend to work in that phase process that allows us to make sure we’re aligned the entire way. Again, using connectivity is a bit of a diagnostic tool.
Adrian Tennant: Let’s take a short break. We’ll be right back after this message.
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Adrian Tennant: Welcome back. I’m talking with Cairo Kenan Marsh, the founder and executive partner of relativ* Marketing Consultancy based in Tokyo, Japan. You’ve worked, of course, across different markets and cultures. How do approaches to building brand relationships differ between Japan and the US?
Cairo Kenan Marsh: It’s really interesting, right? I think they’re the same because I think that relationships at its core is human. And I think humanity, beyond culture, humanity kind of works the same. We have the same needs. We all need to belong. We all want to be supported. We all want to be respected. And I think that’s true in the U.S. and Japan and other markets. I think the differences is some of the tools or techniques that may be applied. For example, Japan historically has been a little bit less data-centric. It’s starting to catch up. The digital age has sort of been the driver for that. The U.S. was a little bit more data-centric going back to the direct marketing era, which Japan sort of missed. So Japan is sort of catching up and sort of applying different tools against that. I think the core principles are fundamentally the same, but I think because of our experiences have been different, you might see some differences in how it manifests in the market.
Adrian Tennant: Well, of course, relativ* emphasizes the marriage of data science and creativity. Cairo, how do you balance these elements in your work?
Cairo Kenan Marsh: I like the way you frame that, the balance of data science and creativity. I personally think it’s all creativity. But I don’t think you’re wrong about the balance, which is why I like how you frame that. And this is cliche, but so true. And I repeat this all the time. Sometimes when I’m talking to data scientists, the Einstein quote that imagination is more important than knowledge. I think to be a great data scientist, it requires creativity. It requires a sense of not just what does the data say, but what are you looking for? What are the possibilities, right? The way that we tend to work is I really want my data science team and our strategy team to imagine the possibilities, imagine what the drivers could be, imagine what we might want to investigate, and we use that to build out hypotheses that we can then test, prove, or solve for. That’s core to how we think. At the same time, We don’t have a typical creative team. We literally call our creative team design. And it’s not just for the semantics sakes of it. In agencies, right, and we all know this, sometimes we get creative awards and creative awards are beautiful. And sometimes creative awards are really about being creative, not necessarily about being effective. Did you do anything or are you just really creative? I don’t care about creativity for creativity’s sake. Creativity has to be applied against problems. And the difference between creativity and design is design addresses something. If I wanted a creative chair, make me a chair, make it as creative as possible, I can make it a knife. Now that’s not very fun to sit on. But if you’re designing the chair, well, you’re designing the chair for a function. So you can make the chair look good, but the chair has got to do chair-like things. And so we challenge our design team or our creative team in that manner to think strategically, to not just focus on ideas and ideation, but go, are you actually solving a particular problem? I don’t care how good or interesting or funny or ha-ha. The idea is, does it solve something? And conversely, we challenge our data team to think imaginatively. Where could we go with this? Where are the possibilities in this data? Don’t just tell me what the data says. Tell me what we’re looking for and that we can then investigate as we need to to solve a problem. So it’s really interesting because I think that imagination is so important across both spectrums. But that balance is sort of, I guess, gained by looking at our design team as solution providers, and looking at our data team as basically people who can be visionaries and be creative around what we’re starting to explore.
Adrian Tennant: We love case studies on IN CLEAR FOCUS. So Cairo, can you share an example from relativ* of how focusing on relationships rather than transactions has led to better outcomes for one of your clients?
Cairo Kenan Marsh: Sure. I’ll tell you a story about one of my favorite clients. They’re all my favorite clients, by the way. They are all my favorite clients. But I’ll tell you a story that I really like. And it goes to the idea of brand-being as well. So one of our clients is Canadian Maple Syrup. So we work with them in Japan. I don’t know if you know or the audience knows, I think Canadian maple syrup is responsible probably for about 75% roughly of all the maple syrup that’s exported around the world. And we help them with their branding, their positioning, their connection with consumers in Japan. One of the things that they found when they came to us is that a lot of their engagement with consumers was purely rational. It was purely around the usage on pancakes, and there wasn’t really much of a sense of, well, why is maple syrup for me? And I think in Japan, because there’s a lot of different alternative sweeteners and a lot of different perceptions of what syrup is good for that almost any other sweetener would do. But it wasn’t exactly for me. So what we worked with them on was, well, what is the core need that people have if they’re going to buy maple syrup? What’s the core thing that’s going to drive them and satisfy them? And how do you position that? And what we found was a lot of that was around not just a desire for sweetness when you’re having pancakes or dessert, but really wanting to know that you’re doing the right thing from a nutrition standpoint. And one of the benefits of maple syrup is that maple syrup is one of the most nutritious sweeteners you can find. One is obviously it’s organic, comes directly from trees. Two, in terms of some of the antioxidants and other properties that it has, it’s really, really robust. But people don’t understand that or didn’t understand that in Japan because, again, it was perceived as just another sweetener option. You might use honey just as much as you would use maple syrup on pancakes and there’s artificial sweetness and things like that. So what we did was we developed this whole proposition called amaidake janai in Japanese, which literally means more than just sweet. And we created a whole visual treatment expressions of it that shows nature’s goodness, if you will, sort of being infused into the food that you would actually use it for in a way that sort of breaks perception of just being another sweetener. And even more importantly, what I think really resonated about this, I don’t want to say campaign because we use it as a brand platform. It’s not just one campaign. It’s something that we’ve developed for them. We’ve created a bunch of iterations over the past four and a half years for them. But one of the things that we tried to deal with is how do you make people actually also understand that in a local way? In Japan there’s, and I’ll get this wrong not being Japanese, so please forgive me to all my Japanese friends, but there’s a type of cuisine, like the way that we might think of vegan food in the U.S., they call it shojin yori. And shojin yori is literally foods that monks would eat. And it’s a purity of it, right? What that means, it doesn’t come from animal byproducts and things like that. Like honey, for example, even though it may be natural, comes from bees, so it doesn’t qualify. You know, it’s not pure enough for a monk. Maple syrup actually is in this case. So we actually did, beyond the whole sort of platform and ideas and content, we also did a partnership with some monks, literally, in Japan. to have them build a restaurant experience for a few days, right, where we actually had them develop certain menu items and we promoted that. And the idea was this whole concept, and we call it, playfully, maple monks, in the sense that maple is so pure that you can literally have monks eat it. The idea that’s beautiful about that is not just the proposition, But as a foreign product, as a foreign brand in Japan, it’s not enough to just say we’re pure or vegan. Contextualizing it in the context of shojin yori, which is culturally relevant, then allows us to people actually feel that. And so by doing that, I think what we’ve tried to do is, as you said, move past the idea of just transactions, but to a point of hyper relevancy for our audience. And what we’ve seen over the past four years, it’s consistent increases in awareness, consideration, as well as imports of maple into Japan.
Adrian Tennant: Excellent, sounds like a really effective brand platform. So Cairo, what would be some advice you might offer brand marketers who want to shift towards more relationship-focused strategies?
Cairo Kenan Marsh: Some key things would be – one is know who you’re serving. And I think one of the things that brands struggle with is this idea that my products for everybody. And the idea of my products for everybody, what that means is that you usually don’t have a clear articulation of what you’re offering and why you do it. Because if your brand is for grandmas, 12-year-old kids, and single dads, Okay, they’re not all in it for the same thing, right? You’re going really broad in terms of what you’re offering. Therefore, it doesn’t feel like it’s anything. So you can’t have a relationship with someone unless that relationship is inherently personal about what I’m there for and doing for you. So I think you have to choose who you serve. Now, one of the things that I would say about that is that serving someone doesn’t mean that you have to exclude anyone. It can be aspirational who you serve. because then people want to be like that person. You know, if you think about Nike serving athletes or Apple when they first, in the 80s, were serving artists. I’m not an athlete, I’m not an artist, but I wish I was. The fact that you’re really honed in on servicing a group that I actually wish I was a part of does allow you to have an expanded reach. But then when you actually deliver things, you’re still speaking in context of service to that audience, which therefore is way more powerful. That’s one of the foundational things I think you have to do in terms of building relationships. The other thing that I think is really critical is you have to know really what your brand is about and what you’re offering. I don’t think brands can be too malleable. In a certain way, just as people have personalities, people have a sense of authenticity or lack of authenticity. So do brands and consumers can tease that out. You don’t have to try to be everything to everybody. You have to be your authentic self to the people that you serve. And that will actually resonate more. You look at a brand like Liquid Death, for that example, they’re doing what they’re doing, and it’s completely cool. And Coca-Cola cannot do that. but they are clear about who they are. And I think that’s appealing nonetheless, you know, because that’s their personality. So I think that’s really important. And really, the third part is to make sure you’re acting in service, making sure that you are at points of interaction, that you’re making a value add for the user you’re interacting with. whether it’s delivery or sales, making sure that that experience is what you want to be and congruent with your personality and what the consumer’s expectations are. So I think if you do those three things, that’s where you build relationships. And probably the fourth thing is just to measure it, because as they always say, what gets measured gets managed. If it’s not measured, if you’re not able to attribute that in the business value, then it probably won’t seem worthwhile. What we found is that investing in relationships actually lead to positive business outcomes, but you’ve got to kind of do that.
Adrian Tennant: Wise words. Great conversation. Cairo, if listeners would like to learn more about relativ* or connect with you, what’s the best way to do so?
Cairo Kenan Marsh: The best way you could go to our website, relativ* – no ‘E’ – dot com, so that’s R-E-L-A-T-I-V.com. From there, you can find our social media, LinkedIn, we have some articles, information there. You can always find me if you search “Cairo Kenan Marsh,” K-E-N-A-N Marsh. I’m the only one that pops up with that name, so you’ll be able to find me, you can follow me and message me on any platform, be happy to talk.
Adrian Tennant: Perfect. Cairo, thank you very much for being our guest on IN CLEAR FOCUS.
Cairo Kenan Marsh: Great. Thank you very much, Adrian. I appreciate it.
Adrian Tennant: Thanks again to my guest this week, Cairo Kenan Marsh, the founder and executive partner of relativ* marketing consultancy. As always, you’ll find a complete transcript of our conversation with timestamps and links to the resources we discussed on the IN CLEAR FOCUS page at bigeyeagency.com. Just select ‘Insights’ from the menu. Thank you for listening to IN CLEAR FOCUS, produced by Bigeye. I’ve been your host, Adrian Tennant. Until next week, goodbye.
TIMESTAMPS
00:00: Introduction to Relationship Design
00:48: Consumer Loyalty Trends
01:31: Meet Cairo Kenan Marsh
02:35: Cairo’s Journey from New York to Tokyo
03:05: Founding relativ*
06:21: Services Offered by relativ*
07:23: The Philosophy Behind relativ*
09:02: Strategy: Questions Over Answers
11:49: Brand-Being vs. Brand-ing
13:40: Scaling with Authentic Relationships
15:01: Remote Work Dynamics
16:11: Discovery and Market Intelligence Framework
19:29: Cultural Differences in Brand Relationships
20:48: Balancing Data Science and Creativity
23:22: Case Study: Canadian Maple Syrup
28:05: Advice for Relationship-Focused Strategies
31:04: Closing Remarks and Thanks
