Senior VP Marketing

Senior Vice President, Marketing

Reports to: President, Thrive Restaurant Group

Location: Wichita, KS

Role Summary

We’re looking for a strategic marketer and creative brand builder to lead marketing across our multi-brand restaurant company—someone who thrives at the intersection of brand, business, and guest experience. You’ll own the performance of marketing initiatives across a portfolio of 185 restaurants, including both franchised brands (like Applebee’s and Qdoba) and fast-growing in-house concepts (HomeGrown, Modern Market and Carlos O’Kelly’s).

You’ll need to be as fluent in performance marketing metrics as you are in menu innovation, as comfortable talking LTO strategy as you are talking pricing models. You bring an operator’s mindset, a builder’s creativity, and a marketer’s intuition for what makes something crave able, competitive, and worth coming back for. And you’re not afraid to challenge what’s always been done—because unlocking growth often means breaking through the obvious.

Core Responsibilities

• Business & Brand Growth
• Own and drive the sales, traffic, and profitability performance of all marketing initiatives across in-house and franchised brands.
• Develop strategic brand platforms that guide menu development, experience design, and competitive differentiation.
• Work closely with brand presidents and the executive team to build brand equity, increase same-store sales, and support new unit growth.
• Know the numbers-understand key business performance indicators, objectives and brand strategies-and ensure marketing is directly aligned to support them.
• Manage and maximize relationships with third-party delivery service providers (Door Dash, Uber Eats, etc.)—ensuring strong brand presentation, optimized menu and pricing strategies, promotional alignment, and performance reporting that supports both off-premise sales growth and healthy margins.
• Digital, Local & Performance Marketing
• Lead the strategy and execution of digital, performance, and loyalty marketing—ensuring that the design and functionality of campaigns, platforms, and virtual guest experiences are built to drive measurable outcomes like new guest acquisition, frequency, and lifetime value.
• Own performance marketing—the data-driven, conversion-focused side of marketing that uses digital channels (social [organic/paid], email, SEO/M, SMS, loyalty, etc.) to impact traffic directly, avg. check, orders, and revenue. You’ll test, optimize, and adjust spending based on what works.
• Oversee the creation and optimization of tools that support first party online ordering, ensuring the experience is intuitive, convenient, and brand-aligned—focusing on reducing friction and increasing direct digital revenue.
• Build out and maximize a robust CRM platform—leveraging guest data to personalize campaigns, improve frequency, drive loyalty engagement, and support lifecycle marketing strategies across dine-in, off-premise, and digital channels.
• Monitor and maintain the functionality, usability, and performance of websites and digital ordering platforms, ensuring they meet modern guest expectations, stay up to date with evolving tech and design standards, and support ongoing marketing and conversion goals.
• Build strong local marketing playbooks that empower multi-unit leaders and GMs to activate marketing at the store level in their community.
• Use community partnerships, influencers, and events to create buzz and build guest connections at the local level.
• Ensure all campaigns are framed and evaluated with robust analytics, ROI tracking, and clear KPIs to evaluate impact and inform strategy.
• Pricing, Research & Menu Strategy
• Partner with culinary and operations teams to bring consumer insights, pricing intelligence, and trend research to contribute to menu development.
• Monitor and respond to competitive positioning in each market and segment.
• Leverage research to identify guest preferences, behavioral trends, and whitespace opportunities.
• Bring a point of view on what’s crave able and how to tell that story—whether through imagery, words, or experience.
• Team, Culture & Cross-Functional Collaboration
• Lead, coach, and grow a cross-functional team including content, design, brand management.
• Foster a culture of curiosity, performance, and collaboration
• Build and maintain a flexible network of external partners-creative agencies, digital experts, research firms, and freelancers-to expand expertise, scale up or down around key initiatives, and continuously bring fresh thinking, tools, and ideas into the team.
• Collaborate with operations, culinary, tech, and finance to ensure marketing is aligned, integrated, and delivering real business impact.
  
  

Key Expectations

• Analytical & Accountable: Bring a thoughtful, test-and-learn approach to understanding what’s working. You design initiatives with clear KPIs and clean measurement in mind—using tools like A/B testing, pilot markets, or phased rollouts. When results vary, you stay curious and collaborative, avoiding blame and working cross-functionally to uncover insights and improve.
• Digitally Fluent: Drive performance in today’s digital-first world—CRM, paid social, email, SEO/SEM, loyalty, and beyond.
• Brand Builder: Shape and scale brands that connect emotionally with guests while standing out in a crowded field.
• Local Store Smart: Translate brand strategy into local store action that moves the needle and creates real community engagement.
• Partnership-Oriented: Leverage the power of external partnerships—local organizations, national platforms, and franchisees—and use them to extend reach and impact.
• Data-Informed: You use research, data, and analytics to guide priorities, test hypotheses, and optimize results
• Restaurant Business Obsessed: You get what it takes to drive traffic in the restaurant world and are always hunting for the next edge—menu trends, pricing levers, brand love, or operational insight.
  
  

Challenge Mindset: You respectfully question status quo thinking and push for bold ideas that help the team break out of "the way we've always done it."

Thrive Restaurant Group is an equal-opportunity employer committed to hiring a diverse workforce and sustaining an inclusive culture.

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