Puissante Group

Bryar Hind is a hospitality marketing leader with experience in brand development, digital marketing, public relations and guest experience across hospitality venues and events. Her career began in event coordination and hospitality operations before progressing into marketing leadership roles. As Director of Marketing at Pearle Hospitality, she oversees brand strategy and guest engagement across a diverse portfolio of hospitality brands. She is also co-founder of Puissante Group, and works independently with brands on marketing and brand strategy.

Shaping Brands across a Diverse Hospitality Portfolio

My team at Pearle Hospitality oversees how each brand appears from first discovery through arrival. Our portfolio comprises restaurants, hotels, spas, wedding and event spaces and a golf course. Our responsibilities span brand design, websites, social content, email marketing, public relations, partnerships, out-of-home marketing, menus and digital advertising.

The portfolio also includes restored 19th-century mills, an organic farm and a hotel on the waterfront of Lake Ontario. My responsibility is ensuring each brand feels distinct while aligning the online experience with the one guests encounter in person. Because in hospitality, the marketing and the experience aren’t two separate things—the marketing makes a promise, and the venue has to keep it.

Creating Meaningful Guest Connections

Hospitality marketing is built on human connection. Every initiative is measured by its emotional impact on the guest and its measurable impact on the property. Working with some of the most beautiful venues in Canada gives us the opportunity to deliver both.

Every touchpoint across the guest journey must move someone and move the numbers. The experiences we market are inherently emotional, making connection and performance equally important. While operations teams lead service delivery, marketing helps shape expectations throughout the journey. Success depends on driving engagement and results.

That does not mean creating more digital touchpoints. Guests are already inundated with screens, moving from phones to laptops to televisions while deciding where to spend their attention.

To me, the real luxury is removing that decision-making. Whether someone is choosing where to eat, where to get married or where to book a hotel stay or spa experience, our role is to reduce friction and make the choice easier. When that happens, marketing often becomes invisible. Guests feel the choice was their own and rarely notice the work that guided them there.

The most effective marketing is the kind people do not realize they are experiencing.

Consistency Is Not Sameness

Managing multiple brands across hospitality verticals requires balancing consistency with individuality. Consistency helps uphold standards and creates cohesion across the portfolio, while sameness can diminish what makes each property special. Maintaining that distinction across brand messaging and digital experiences helps ensure every property retains its identity while remaining connected to the broader portfolio.

Achieving that balance depends on collaboration. Nothing in marketing happens in isolation, making communication essential across departments and stakeholders.

One principle that guides my leadership approach is a phrase often shared by another woman leader within our organization: “Clarity is kindness.” Many professionals worry about over-communicating or over-explaining, though I have found under-communicating creates greater challenges. Unclear communication can create confusion and silos, while clarity creates alignment and fairness across teams.

Quality serves as the final measure for every initiative. Every guest-facing touchpoint must reflect the experience people encounter in person. Quality does not necessarily mean something elaborate, but communicating the right message in the right way for the property. If it does not meet that standard, it does not move forward.

Using Technology to Strengthen Guest Connection

Technology continues to reshape how brands understand and engage guests, though its purpose remains the same. Marketing exists to create human connections. In hospitality, every tool and every piece of data should help strengthen those connections.

Data helps answer a fundamental question: how a guest wants to be connected with, and what inspires action. We intentionally use the term “guest” instead of “consumer” because hospitality is rooted in service. Understanding guest preferences helps determine which messages resonate, how guests prefer to engage and what encourages action.

A guest-first perspective shapes how technology is used. Digital tools help teams become faster and more efficient, though quality and connection remain the priority. Optimization matters, but hospitality can feel transactional when the focus shifts too heavily toward process and efficiency. The strongest outcomes come from using technology to support meaningful guest experiences, not simply improve performance.

AI has become an important part of that conversation. Organizations need to adopt these tools thoughtfully while keeping the human hand in the work. A distinction is between using AI to replace creativity and using it to strengthen it. The greatest value comes from enhancing the creative process, not replacing it.

"Hospitality marketing is about building human connections, and every decision we make is shaped by how we want people to feel."

That balance remains especially important in hospitality, where data works alongside design, copywriting and storytelling. Physical prints and strong design create emotional responses that technology alone cannot replicate. In luxury hospitality, less is often more. Thoughtful use of technology often creates a stronger experience than simply adding more of it.

Technology does not need to exist in every guest-facing touchpoint. While many hotels continue introducing digital tools, luxury can sometimes be found in picking up a phone or engaging with well-designed print collaterals. The objective is to use technology to become faster and better while remaining focused on guests and what they want to receive.

Leading Through Presence and Perspectives

My advice to marketing leaders is to know the product and the guest and build relationships across teams. Strong leaders maintain close connections that create collaboration and a clearer understanding of the guest experience.

That understanding cannot come entirely from a screen, as the guest journey extends well beyond the digital experience. Hospitality marketing lives within the properties and with the guests and team members experiencing them each day.

Hospitality, being a 24/7 business, operates differently from many industries. Important moments often happen outside traditional working hours. The magic tends to happen after five-seven days a week. So get out from behind the laptop. Sit at the bar after service and watch how guests actually move through a space. It sharpens everything from your content to your website hierarchy in ways data alone never will. Direct observation remains one of the most valuable sources of insight. Watching how guests move, act and consume reveals what captures attention and drives engagement that data alone cannot. Staying connected to those realities keeps leaders closer to the guest experience.

My background in operations continues to shape how I lead. I approach challenges through a service lens and apply an operator’s perspective to solving them. That perspective keeps strategy grounded in the realities of hospitality. And the most important thing marketers can do is make sure our operators know we’re in it with them.