You know when a company brags about its “great culture,” but the employees look dead inside? That’s because culture isn’t what leaders say it is — it’s what customers feel. In this episode, Mark Rampolla, founder of ZICO Coconut Water and managing partner at Ground Force Capital, tells us how culture quietly shapes every customer interaction. From Liquid Death’s branding genius to why “culture fit” hiring is a terrible idea, Mark breaks down what it really takes to build a company people actually want to engage with.We also dive into the “need behind the need” (AKA why customers don’t buy what you’re selling but what it does for them). Mark shares how ZICO won over yoga studios by solving problems beyond hydration and why understanding where your customers make their money is the key to selling. If your culture, hiring, or customer experience feels off, this conversation holds the solution you’re looking for. Key Moments: 00:00 Who is Mark Rampolla, founder of ZICO & managing partner at GroundForce Capital?01:02 Building a Movement02:13 Why Company Culture Matters03:35 Culture in Action: Real-World Examples08:27 Hiring a Culture Add & Customer Obsession17:36 Assessing and Evolving Company Culture24:42 Understanding the Need Behind the Need25:06 Real-World Examples of Customer Empathy26:17 Building Relationships with Yoga Studios29:31 Marketing Strategies and ROI31:34 Hypothesis Testing & the Opportunities in Operational Failure38:17 Active Listening and Empathy in Business41:24 Impressive Brand Experiences43:18 Mark’s Key Advice for CX Leaders –Are your teams facing growing demands? Join CX leaders transforming their AI strategy with Agentforce. Start achieving your ambitious goals. Visit salesforce.com/agentforce Mission.org is a media studio producing content alongside world-class clients. Learn more at mission.org
Chapter 1: Who is Mark Rampolla and what is his background?
Culture endures. It can last for generations if done right. This is the sort of stuff that becomes legacy for decades, if not longer.
What do you think are some of the biggest mistakes companies make when it comes to creating a great customer experience?
Chapter 2: Why is company culture important to customer experience?
Assuming they have to solve it all up front before they get out and learn. There's just nothing like getting out and learning. Fail fast, iterate constantly, see reality. What's really going on in your business? What's going on in consumers? What's going on in trends? Be very clear about your intention, what you're trying to build and what the hypothesis is.
We go all in for weeks or months until we step back and look, is it working? Does that hypothesis still hold? Is the intention still clear? We can't control the outcome. Dive back in, do it again.
What if it doesn't work? You have to totally shift gears. But if we look at something as an experiment.
Everything I do in my life now is an experiment. Nobody has it figured out. You don't have to have it figured out. It's all testing. It's all learning.
Hello, everyone, and welcome to Experts of Experience. I'm your host, Lauren Wood. Today, we are going to be talking about how culture isn't just an internal aspect of your organization, but a direct driver of your customer experience. And there is no better person to speak to us about this than Mark Rampolla, the founder of Zico Coconut Water, and now the managing partner at Ground Force Capital.
At Zico, Mark didn't just launch a brand. He built a movement by deeply understanding every layer of the customer journey. From yoga studios to retail partners, he knew that delivering a great product wasn't enough. It was really about solving the need behind the need, which we're going to talk about today. I'm really excited. And creating a team that was really obsessed with the mission.
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Chapter 3: How do you hire for culture add versus culture fit?
Chapter 4: What are real-world examples of effective company culture?
We go all in for weeks or months until we step back and look, is it working? Does that hypothesis still hold? Is the intention still clear? We can't control the outcome. Dive back in, do it again.
What if it doesn't work? You have to totally shift gears. But if we look at something as an experiment.
Everything I do in my life now is an experiment. Nobody has it figured out. You don't have to have it figured out. It's all testing. It's all learning.
Hello, everyone, and welcome to Experts of Experience. I'm your host, Lauren Wood. Today, we are going to be talking about how culture isn't just an internal aspect of your organization, but a direct driver of your customer experience. And there is no better person to speak to us about this than Mark Rampolla, the founder of Zico Coconut Water, and now the managing partner at Ground Force Capital.
At Zico, Mark didn't just launch a brand. He built a movement by deeply understanding every layer of the customer journey. From yoga studios to retail partners, he knew that delivering a great product wasn't enough. It was really about solving the need behind the need, which we're going to talk about today. I'm really excited. And creating a team that was really obsessed with the mission.
And so Mark now works with entrepreneurs to scale businesses with the same customer first mindset. So we're going to get into culture, accountability and trust building and how that all lines up to a great customer experience. Mark, so great to have you on the show.
Great to be here, Lauren. Thanks for inviting me.
So I want to dive into company culture, because when we spoke earlier, I just saw you light up about this topic. And it's one of my favorite topics. And I host the show, so I get to decide what we talk about. But you mentioned that company culture really takes shape whether leaders are intentional about it or not.
Mm-hmm.
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Chapter 5: How do you assess and evolve company culture?
You doing a class tonight, right? To see that there's some Zico material there, it becomes an experience, right? That tells me we're building the kind of culture that, Because that person that's a sales rep, it's been on the job for a day or a week or somebody they're training with is so obsessed with the culture, so obsessed with the brand that it's coming to life in everything they do, right?
And so what I look for when I'm meeting with companies now is, you know, what the CEO says is, founder says is one thing. What I want to see is, I'll talk to the junior most person I can meet. Tell me about the company. What are you guys up to? Right. And that tells me so much more than what you see on posters or hear from them. I want to see, I talk to customers, right?
What we, we do deep diligence. Okay. What's their experience with that, with this company? How do they experience the team? How does it show up in different ways?
Right.
What does it look like? You know, if I'm walking through a warehouse, I'll talk to the warehouse people. I want to see what I what somebody in the back room of a store, how they experience a brand or a service, that gives me a sense of what culture is.
I think it's really interesting when I look at some of the portfolio companies that you've invested in at Ground Force Capital, Liquid Death being one of them, where I think anyone who has picked up one of those cans feels the culture. There's such a strong statement in that brand. When you see it on literally anywhere where you see it or experience it, it's like oozing culture.
And I'm curious if we look at this example of, What is the culture like inside of that biz? Like when you look inside, where does it start? If you can kind of help to describe a little bit.
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Chapter 6: What is the 'need behind the need' in customer engagement?
Yeah, that's a prime example. That is sort of the textbook, so non-textbook, but yet is textbook example. That starts with Mike Cesaro, the founder. And this is who he is. He is... Tatted up, he lives sort of an alternative lifestyle, but he's also got kids and he's a funny guy and he loves humor.
And so this was his way of just sort of saying, wait a second, I'm not the only one out there that both likes water, wouldn't be caught dead drinking a Fiji or a Dasani, doesn't represent his lifestyle, but he can poke fun at everything to a certain extent, right? Mm-hmm.
So that shows up in, certainly they've built a marketing team that's almost Saturday Night Live skit level, you know, writers and teams of creativity. But it also shows up in just the way they go to market and the way they sell. And now they have formal board meetings and they have formal processes, but everything's got a little edge of humor.
All the presentations, all the deck, all the communication, all the swag, everything has this sort of edge to it that represents the brand. And the beauty is, you know, what I saw as well with Zico when it was acquired by Coke, when you do these things right, it endures. Culture endures. And it starts early, but it can last forever. you know, generations if done right.
And so what I love about Liquid Death is they're doing that not just for the brand today, but this is the sort of stuff that becomes legacy for decades, if not longer.
Mm-hmm. when I pick up those cans and I read the copywriting, there's like no way that they are not having fun. You know, you can like feel those conversations. So you sharing.
The office is in LA and yeah, they've got a skateboard area and a ping pong table area.
Of course.
It's, it's, it's a blast, but that really, that really does orient it from Mike. And I, you know, we took, we invited Mike and one of his senior guys on a trip we do as a firm snowboarding. These guys crushed it. I mean, you have people, some of them were skiing, some were snowboarding. These guys are amazing. Right. And so they're, that's their lifestyle. They're having fun. Yeah.
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Chapter 7: How do brands like Liquid Death exemplify strong culture?
And I've been a part of companies where the CEO was literally cut from the same cloth as the customer. Like they are the customer or their parents were the customer. And then other companies where it wasn't so. Yeah.
I think that just because you're not, you are not your customer doesn't mean that you can't be obsessed with your customer, but there is, it still requires tactfulness and intention to really create customer obsession at every layer of the business. So I'd love to hear a little bit about how you've done that in the past.
Yeah, for sure. And I'll give you a story around that. So yeah, I love the way you think about, you talk about this and it's the way I think about this is, you know, every, there's multiple customers, right? And in our business, most of the consumer products business tends to be customers, a distributor, a retailer, and then the ultimate end consumer.
They're all extremely relevant in that process. So as a prime example, one of our main customers early on was a big distributor in New York by the name of Big Guys, a famous. They've put a lot of brands on the map, but these are like old school, New York, tough distributors. And to be very transparent, like it's not my people, right? It's not, I'm not exactly vibing with these guys.
And so, but I knew how important they were. And so I remember early on trying to get their attention. And by the way, they're selling to yoga studios. And I was more comfortable in that environment than I was with these children.
I can scratch your back, you can scratch mine.
Yeah, exactly. But what was interesting is to be very frank, these guys weren't giving me the time of day and I was having a hard time connecting with them. I saw a young guy, Andy, that was working for a brand. Vitamin Water was taking off at the time. Andy was Mr. Cool. He walks through the warehouse. Everybody's high-fiving. He's telling jokes. He's having fun.
He was super comfortable in that environment and they loved him. And so what I realized is I need that. So I hired him. So you gotta know yourself. And what I find with great CEOs, great founders, they know themselves, right? It's impossible for everybody to be perfect at all levels of connection with everyone. And so in this situation, what I knew is I needed him
high-fiving and engaging with the distributors, I could upset the direction, but he was going to do that way better than I could.
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Chapter 8: What advice can leaders take to improve company culture?
Also getting those insights from your team. I always will make a KPI for my team, team engagement. And so it's not just a, oh, we do this survey because we're supposed to. It's we're measuring this because it is just as important as our customer retention metric. It is just as important as NRR because it is. If your team's not engaged, the rest of the organization is just not going to function.
And like you said, any of these, I find the great companies, every function they're looking at that way, right? Get an outside perspective. What's best in class? What are we doing on customer attention? What are we doing on operations and finance? What are we doing in marketing? And what are we doing on people and talent? And having that outside perspective.
The other thing that came to mind for me as you were sharing that is, One of the things, I've run numerous organizations, up to 300 people. And to what you said is very true. It's virtually impossible to be in it and look at it at the same time. And in addition to outside talent assessments and advisors, one thing I'm a big fan of is facilitators.
Mm-hmm.
Because it's virtually impossible, there's a lot of research on this in group dynamics, to be both the leader and the facilitator of a meeting, even just every meeting, right? So we as a firm, we spend the money and have professional dedicated facilitators for our big meetings, right? And it just pays huge dividends to get that.
Not every company can afford that at every size, but there's something particularly for big strategy meetings, for larger groups, like having professional facilitation.
Mark, you're bringing a tear to my eye because I trained to be a facilitator for this exact reason.
Oh, I love it.
Because I was in so many strategy meetings where we'd do these offsites and spend all this time and end up just fighting with each other. And it was getting us nowhere. And when I went and...
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