Executive Director of Brand Marketing

About VAI Resort

VAI Resort is a first-of-its-kind, entertainment-driven destination in Glendale, Arizona, featuring a state-of-the-art amphitheater, multiple live performance venues, the world's first Mattel Adventure Park™, swimming oasis, 27 bars and restaurants, including celebrity-chef concepts, and more. With more than 1,000 rooms across four hotels, some with concert-viewing balconies, it will be the largest resort in Arizona.

The Role

We are looking for an Executive Director of Brand Marketing who is looking to challenge the traditional hospitality norms. This role is for a marketer who understands that luxury at VAI isn't quiet—it’s amplified, high-energy, and unapologetically bold.

Reporting to the SVP of Marketing, this Executive Director of Brand Marketing will play an essential role in defining, and being the guardian of, the VAI brand identity, ensuring every touchpoint resonates with the guest. They will also help define all the key amenity-brands within VAI, ensuring unique positioning, consistency in communication, and a VAI-worthy guest experience

If you find comfort in "the way it’s always been done”, this is not the role for you. Our expectation is for this candidate to make us 20% uncomfortable and to dare to be different.

What You’ll Do

• Define, evolve and defend the VAI brand, ensuring unique positioning and consistency in communication
• Lead the Creative Services team and partner with the Creative Director in cultivating an aesthetic that communicates VAI’s core brand
• Oversee the brand synergy between VAI and iconic partners (e.g., Mattel)
• Lead the creation of new names and positioning for products so that our brand architecture is clear and provides competitive differentiation.
• Supervise the Internal Communications Manager to develop and implement strategies to ensure all team members have a deep understanding of brand.
• Oversee the Public Relations Manager to ensure PR initiatives are developed and executed flawlessly
• Act as the primary liaison between VAI and both PR and Brand/Creative agencies with additional key influence on the media agency relationship
• Manage the social team’s development and execution of an annual content calendar, collaborating with other department leads to ensure strategy, tactics and timing aligns with business results
• Lead the concepting and development of VAI branded experiences both on-site (both front-of-house and back-of-house) and off-site (booths at conferences, pop-up experiences at food/music festivals, etc)

What You Bring

• Accountable, hands-on, dynamic, and passionate leadership style
• Excellent judgement and creative problem-solving skills, including negotiation and conflict resolution skills.
• Superior leadership skills with the ability to influence and engage direct reports and indirect peers.
• Strategic thinker with a proven ability to make decisions, and drive results in a dynamic and competitive environment
• Embody VAI’s core values: Collaboration, Ownership, Resiliency, & Enthusiasm.
• Comfortable working in an agile, construction/development environment
• The courage to build a brand that’s unabashedly different.

Education | Experience

• Bachelor’s degree in marketing, business, communications, or related field preferred.
• Minimum of 10 years of progressively responsible marketing experience, from either on the brand or agency side.
• Hotel/Resort experience is not a requirement.