Chief Brand 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 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.

• 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.

• 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, way finding, 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.

• Define the internal VAI brand experience and equip team members to continuously socialize and reinforce the VAI vision, brand, and experience…