Kimberly Gouch

Chief Brand Officer 

For more than 30 years Kim Gouch has honed her ability to create brands and scale profitable businesses. Using innovative business practices coupled with strategic initiatives, she has consistently propelled brand exposure, revenues, and market expansion from start-ups to established CPG products, franchise systems and corporate entities spanning across multiple industry giants such as Diageo, Marriott, Brinker International, Disney, MGM Casinos and many more. Her proven track record is supported by her leadership skills, sharp business acumen, and practice of transformational business ingenuities.

Kim’s broad branding and marketing skillset helped launch The Residence Inn by Marriott (RIBM) hospitality brand from its infancy to 100+ hotel locations throughout the United States. Expanding on that success, Kim jumped into the Wireless Telephony industry as a DMA and Market Development expert pioneering a new PCS consumer mobile phone technology.  She became a key player for the introduction of the first National Wireless PCS technology brand – VoiceStream Wireless, which eventually became T-Mobile.

Moving back to the hospitality industry, she was hand-picked by an entrepreneur to lead the national branding, marketing, and development initiatives for a fast casual start-up in its infancy. Her branding and marketing efforts helped drive rapid growth achieving 100+ units of real estate development within four years, culminating annual revenues of $25M. Building on that success, she commenced her consulting career and was instrumental in facilitating the corporate merge of an East coast entity with a West coast-based franchise business resulting in a bi-coastal Billion-dollar hospitality and restaurant giant that integrated franchisor/franchisee communities and key stakeholders for rapid scale and footprint expansion.  She then became the CMO and quickly addressed the immediate needs required to support the growth, planning for future expansion, and providing field marketing services to safeguard each brand. Strategies were developed to revitalize underperforming brands, create new concepts to strengthen the business mix, constructing a full-service in-house marketing and advertising team to support the field, renewing overall associate confidence by creating cross-functionality to ultimately position the company’s brands for long-term, sustainable, and profitable growth.

Identifying a market niche need in the restaurant marketing category, Kim launched Ignite Creative Services, LLC., (ICS). A full-service food and beverage brand and marketing agency designed to provide strategy, branding, design, marketing, advertising, operations training, and promotions consulting and services for both Operator and Supplier. As Principal Owner and Partner, she built a multi-million-dollar global agency managing brand giants like Diageo, Brown-Forman, Landry’s Dining and Hospitality Brands, Brinker International, Marriott, Hilton, MGM Casinos, and Universal Studios with budgets more than $250MM, among many others.

Currently, as the Chief Brand Officer (CBO) for Retro Fitness, she is charged with spearheading the Retro Fitness Brand presence, B2C and B2B growth through the implementation of innovative strategies and tactics. She will employ cohesive customer experiences to further drive revenue among 150+ club-level and franchise fitness facilities across the US while developing aggressive plans to expand the brand footprint across the country. Her immediate focus is to apply transformational practices for swift acceleration of the internal Marketing teams that optimize the Join Now Media suite of services designed to support the franchise community, elevate the brand presence domestically and internationally, catapult franchise development/B2B marketing efforts and drive consumer/B2C market penetration, membership, and longevity.