Chief Brand and Experience Officer

About VAI Resort

VAI Resort is a premiere entertainment resort conveniently located in Glendale, AZ at the heart of Metro Phoenix. VAI Resort will be Arizona’s largest hotel, entertainment, and culinary that spans four hotels, anchored by an amphitheater with year-round entertainment for 11,000 attendees. Guests can spend a day at VAI Beach’s 5-acre swimming oasis, explore the world’s first Mattel Adventure Park, dine across 12 restaurants (including three celebrity chef concepts), shop 70,000 square feet of retail, or unwind at our spa — all part of a resort built for guests to "Live for the Encore." VAI Resort is targeting an opening date in 2028.

The Opportunity

The Chief Brand & Experience Officer is the executive leader responsible for defining, protecting, and bringing to life the VAI brand and experience across every guest and team member touchpoint.

This leader will shape the emotional, visual, physical, and experiential elements that make VAI unlike any traditional resort, entertainment venue, theme park, or destination. From the first impression of VAI through a guest’s arrival, stay, departure, and desire to return for an Encore, this executive ensures that what VAI promises is what VAI delivers.

The Chief Brand & Experience Officer will establish a distinctive global brand, design extraordinary experiences, and create the standards and systems that allow the entire organization to consistently deliver them.

This is an enterprise experience role—not simply a brand marketing or creative role. The Chief Brand & Experience Officer connects brand promise with operational reality, working across the organization to ensure VAI is clearly understood, consistently delivered, emotionally remembered, widely shared, and extraordinary enough for guests to return.

Essential Functions

Brand Strategy, Creative & Storytelling

• Define and protect VAI’s brand positioning, personality, voice, visual identity, and brand architecture.
• Translate VAI’s vision into clear brand principles and actionable standards.
• Establish what meaningfully differentiates VAI from traditional resorts, entertainment venues, theme parks, and other destinations.
• Lead the creative vision across content, design, photography, video, digital experiences, signage, branded environments, communications, and storytelling.
• Create a cohesive destination narrative connecting VAI’s hotels, entertainment, restaurants, nightlife, attractions, events, and experiences.
• Lead VAI’s public relations and reputation strategy, ensuring media relations, external communications, and earned storytelling strengthen brand awareness, credibility, and cultural relevance.
• Build a brand capable of generating national and international recognition, visitation, loyalty, and long-term enterprise value.
• Serve as the executive guardian of the VAI brand, ensuring it remains distinctive, aspirational, culturally relevant, and difficult to replicate.

Experience Design & Guest Experience

• Map and continuously improve critical touchpoints across arrival, parking, check-in, accommodations, dining, entertainment, attractions, pools, beaches, retail, transportation, digital experiences, and departure.
• Establish VAI’s enterprise-wide guest experience philosophy, service standards, and experience expectations.
• Identify opportunities to eliminate friction, create emotional connections, surprise guests, and deliver memorable signature moments.
• Influence environmental storytelling, art and aesthetic direction, interiors, music, lighting, scent, signage, wayfinding, uniforms, amenities, and other sensory elements to create a cohesive and distinctly VAI experience.
• Develop differentiated experiences for leisure travelers, families, couples, concert attendees, local guests, VIPs, groups, and convention attendees.
• Establish Voice of the Guest systems, experience audits, mystery shopping, sentiment analysis, and meaningful guest experience metrics.
• Partner with Operations to translate guest insights into measurable improvements.

Team Member Experience

• Define the internal VAI brand experience and equip team members to continuously socialize and reinforce the VAI vision, brand, and experience throughout the development journey and beyond.
• Partner with Human Resources and operating leaders to embed the brand into hiring, onboarding, learning, recognition, performance management, and leadership development.
• Translate VAI’s service philosophy and experience standards into meaningful training and everyday behaviors.
• Influence uniforms, back-of-house environments, internal communications, and team member touchpoints to reflect the VAI brand.
• Create recognition, storytelling, and engagement strategies that reinforce VAI’s culture and desired behaviors.
• Measure team member understanding and adoption of VAI experience standards and continuously identify opportunities for improvement.

Resort Activations & Innovation

• Establish an integrated resort-wide activation strategy and calendar that creates energy throughout the destination.
• Lead cross-functional planning for holiday and seasonal programming, cultural moments, celebrity and culinary experiences, retail drops, surprise-and-delight experiences, and signature VAI moments.
• Develop traditions and experiences guests anticipate, share, and return to experience.
• Ensure activations strengthen the brand while supporting visitation, guest spending, publicity, engagement, and loyalty.
• Identify emerging guest behaviors, cultural shifts, technologies, and experiential opportunities that can strengthen VAI.
• Look beyond traditional hospitality for inspiration across entertainment, retail, sports, nightlife, technology, food, fashion, wellness, design, and global culture.
• Build a disciplined pipeline for developing, testing, measuring, and scaling new experiences that keep VAI fresh and relevant.

Brand Standards & Enterprise Leadership

• Develop and maintain the VAI Brand & Experience Standards Playbook.
• Establish clear standards, decision rights, and governance for brand expression, experience design, partnerships, signage, uniforms, communications, and major creative decisions.
• Ensure third-party operators, tenants, sponsors, vendors, and partners consistently meet VAI standards.
• Serve as a strategic advisor to the CEO and executive leadership team on brand, experience, culture, guest behavior, competitive positioning, and destination strategy.
• Partner across all functions to connect brand vision with execution.
• Balance creative ambition with operational feasibility, financial return, safety, scalability, and execution readiness.
• Recruit, develop, inspire, and retain exceptional leaders across the Brand & Experience organization.
• Establish clear priorities, ownership, measures, timelines, budgets, and accountability for major initiatives.

Qualifications

• Significant executive leadership experience in experiential or luxury hospitality, entertainment, theme parks, live events, retail, gaming, sports, lifestyle brands, or another experience-led consumer business.
• Demonstrated success launching, repositioning, or transforming a nationally or globally recognized brand.
• Experience influencing the physical product and operating experience—not solely marketing, advertising, or communications.
• Proven leadership of multidisciplinary teams spanning brand, creative, communications, content, guest experience, activations, and experience design, including direct leadership of an internal creative team.
• Experience launching major destinations, properties, venues, platforms, or consumer experiences — pre-opening experience is a strong plus.
• Strong understanding of consumer behavior, segmentation, guest insights, loyalty, reputation, and experience measurement.
• Experience partnering with founders, owners, CEOs, operators, architects, designers, agencies, developers, and creative partners, and comfort taking direction from visionary ownership while driving execution.
• Strong commercial and financial acumen with experience managing significant budgets and evaluating return on investment.
• Proven ability to translate ambitious creative ideas into clear standards, executable plans, measurable outcomes, and scalable systems.
• Bachelor’s degree in marketing, Brand Strategy, Hospitality, Design, Communications, Business, or a related discipline preferred; equivalent executive experience considered.
• A commitment to VAI’s values of Collaboration, Ownership, Resiliency, and Enthusiasm.

Work Environment

This is a full-time, on-site leadership role based in Glendale, Arizona. Because VAI is still under construction, the CBEO should expect a fast-changing environment with shifting priorities and be comfortable setting direction without a fixed roadmap. The role will involve regular collaboration with operating leaders across the property, along with periodic community, government, and industry engagement as VAI’s public profile grows ahead of opening.

Compensation and Benefits

A base salary of along with bonus potential; the bonus structure is still being finalized and will be shared as the search progresses. VAI Resort offers a comprehensive and competitive benefits program, including:

• Medical, dental, and vision
• Company-paid life and LTD insurance, with supplemental plans available
• Generous PTO, including vacation, sick, bereavement, and nine (9) holidays
• Career growth and development
• 401(k) with company match