Hospitality leader shares insights on emotion-led brand building

Hospitality is not hotels.

It’s not a meal in a restaurant. Or real estate. Or even that really nice Dyson hair dryer.

Hospitality is the way you make someone feel.

During my more than 15 years in brand marketing, I’ve learned that feelings can be nudged and encouraged by a series of brand cues. If you’ve ever been in a bad mood after a long day of travel, you know that a welcoming check-in experience, a crisply made bed and a perfect negroni can make all the difference.

Engineering emotional connections

My hospitality career started because of a power outage. My husband was the meeting planner for a conference at the Kimpton Solamar in San Diego when the whole city lost power. What did Kimpton do? With a brand known for its complimentary wine hour, the team started pouring wine — on the house (even though the manual said wine hour should start later in the day). Then they cooked up a free meal for everyone. And they found my husband and started planning how to switch to meeting rooms with natural light.

We felt cared for. Seen. When the lights came on, my husband was enthralled, and I had decided Kimpton was a place I’d like to work someday.

I worked my way up through Kimpton during its 2010s glory days, starting with restaurant public relations, then hotel communications and openings, eventually moving to London to oversee the European brand launch after Kimpton’s acquisition by IHG. The organization I joined prioritized creating compelling experiences over structure. If that meant ordering a machete on Amazon so the city’s hottest bartender could carve coconuts on a rooftop, we would always hit “add to cart” in the name of guest experience.

The IHG acquisition and expansion into new markets added complexity. Suddenly, we had to solve for multiple languages and different cultural expectations. We found our stride when we combined the scale of IHG with emotion-led Kimpton brand cues like locally inspired design, cocktail culture and ridiculously personal experiences — ultimately making Kimpton DeWitt in Amsterdam the most profitable hotel across the entire IHG portfolio in Europe, the Middle East, Asia and Africa (EMEAA).

The takeaway for students in the Pillsbury Institute for Hospitality Entrepreneurship? Swing high to combine highly memorable, emotional experiences with reach and cultural understanding for exponential growth in brand recognition.

Feeling = financing

I was also lucky enough to join Ennismore as it was beginning its growth spurt following a post-COVID-19 joint venture with Accor. It felt like Accor had tossed us the keys to all the fun lifestyle brands, and I was able to claim new brand lanes for 21c Museum Hotels, Mondrian, Hyde and Morgans Originals (yep, like the Morgans Hotel Group brands of Ian Schrager fame).

With around a dozen brands at the time, we learned to be bold with brand definitions. We took inspiration from music festivals for the little-known Hyde brand, adding youthful yet earthy colorways, creating playlists and sourcing such cool sack jackets that employees never wanted to relinquish them to laundry. We nearly tripled the Hyde footprint from four locations to 11 in just under three years, launching Hyde Ibiza with the DJ-scene power broker International Music Summit and Hyde Bodrum with a three-day weekender event featuring Claptone.

Our art direction, Bumble & Bumble bath amenities, colorful key cards and conversational offers all evoked something visceral — that feeling when the people, music and mood feel just right, but high-thread-count sheets are also in your future. This type of tight, touchpoint-focused brand building — combined with stringent revenue optimization and digital marketing — told such a strong story that Barclays valued a potential Ennismore spinoff at a bullish $4 billion to $5.8 billion at the end of 2025.

Budding entrepreneurs should note that a maniacal obsession with brand touchpoints and guest experiences translates directly into enterprise value when you get it right and deliver it consistently.

Keeping our humanity in the age of AI

In this latest age of transformation, some of the most exciting hospitality opportunities sit beyond the traditional hotel business. My hospitality career, which started with a highly memorable conference experience, has now come full circle as I’ve joined Convene Hospitality Group to build a multi-brand platform for meetings and events.

In the age of AI, I’m keeping my lessons on both efficiency and humanity close. AI seems to reward brands that know who they are, which is why you see industry veterans like Hotels.com going back to their roots and investing in brand. Large language models’ reliance on third-party validation invites the elevation of PR, guest reviews and community forums. Meanwhile, TikTok attention spans mean that visual language, art direction and engaging content matter more than ever.

Cornell stalwarts will note that the secret to amplifying brand messages in an agent-to-agent marketing landscape may be leaning into our humanity, our emotions, our feelings and our connections while we maximize AI everywhere else.

Entrepreneurial takeaways

My top takeaway for entrepreneurs and students is to actively build emotional connections with high return on investment, ideally through collaboration, case competitions and interactions with institutions like the Pillsbury Institute for Hospitality Entrepreneurship. Brand assets behave like capital investments: In 1975, only 17% of S&P 500 company value came from intangible assets like brand, IP and relationships. Today, it’s about 92%, according to a study by J.S. Held. Even in complex global environments, leaning into human connections while prioritizing efficiency is the best formula I’ve found to deliver enterprise value, hedge against the downsides of AI and carve out some fun along the way.

About the author

Jacque Riley has more 15 years of experience in global lifestyle hospitality brand building, including her current role as senior vice president for brand marketing for Convene Hospitality Group, where she oversees a recently expanded multi-brand platform.