An Executive Voices Blog by Niko Nickolaou, Senior Director of Special Events & Creative,Gaylord Hotels (Marriott International)

Experience is intensifying, fast. Everywhere I look the bar is going up. More immersion, more detail, more ambition in every new opening. I believe the growth in demand for (and in quality of) themed entertainment is in response to the technology explosion. People spend their days on screens and it’s hard to understand if content is real or generated.

IPs, experiences, and great moments are converging. Brands contain stories people already love, and the location-based entertainment industry is building the physical spaces where those stories become memories. The more digital life grows, the more valuable those physical moments become.

People are hungry for that. They want to feel something real. They want to make a memory. They want a story to tell when they get home.

No Slides Needed

The biggest IPs in the world arrive with their playbook. Guidelines, equity, decades of story. But before contracts, before creative decks, before any of it, I ask for one thing: tell me what matters most. Of everything this IP is, what is the one thing a guest must feel when they walk into our world? No presentation. Just tell me.

The great partners answer without hesitating. They know the difference between the IP on paper and the IP in a room. Everyone else reaches for the deck, and the deck has a hundred right answers, which is the same as having none.That is the first test. It costs nothing and it tells you almost everything.

What IP Actually Brings

Every year at ice!, our immersive Christmas experience, I watch a moment I never get tired of. A grandmother stands in front of Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer carved in ice. She is not looking at the sculpture. She is watching her granddaughter look at it. She grew up watching Rudolph on television. Now she is standing in the cold, holding her granddaughter’s hand, watching the same story told in ice. That moment is not possible without the IP.

We can build something beautiful out of ice. What we cannot build is sixty years of Christmas mornings. The brand brings that with it. The family brings their own history. Our job is to give them a place to stand together while it happens.

We have seen it with Rudolph. We have seen it with The Polar Express. We see it every time a great brand meets a physical space designed to honor it. The IP turns a beautiful attraction into a family tradition. And traditions are what bring people back year after year.

The Mistake That Kills the Magic

The most common mistake I see in branded experiences is also the most obvious once you know to look for it: operators decorate with the IP instead of designing from it.

You walk into the space and the brand is everywhere: logos on the walls, characters on the banners, the name on everything. And you feel nothing. That is the tell. They licensed the IP and used it like wallpaper. The IP is not decoration; it is the reason the guest showed up, which means it has to be the reason for every decision in the room.

What does the guest do here? What do they feel here? What moment will they talk about on the drive home? If the answers would be the same with any brand’s name on the door, the IP is just wallpaper. The operators who understand this start from the story, not the signage. You can spot the difference in the first thirty seconds.

Be the Guardian, Not the Landlord

When brand owners ask me where to start in LBE, the thing I tell them that nobody else in the room will say is this: the IP is the magic, and magic is fragile. The IP is why ten thousand people will drive to you on a Saturday. Nobody falls in love with a queue or a restroom. They fall in love with the story, the characters, the world. But that magic breaks the moment a guest feels mistreated. A two-hour line, a dirty restroom, a staff member who doesn’t know the story. Any one of those factors can undo everything the IP built before the guest ever reached it.

So, our job is not just to showcase the magic. Our job is to protect it. That means the unglamorous work: throughput, staffing, cleanliness, and the thousand small decisions nobody applauds. The IP brings them in the door but the operations are ultimately responsible for whether the magic survives the visit. Be the guardian of the magic, not just its landlord.

What Lasting Actually Means

Novelty opens but memory brings them back. The memory is the point. Not the experience, the memory. That is what people carry out the door.

Every year at ice!, a parent who came as a child now walks in holding their own child’s hand. The story on the walls changes. The people in the room change. But the moment is the same one their family has been having for years, and now there is a new child inside it. That is what lasting actually looks like. It is not a strategy, it is a family deciding, year after year, that this is one of their places. The kind of place their child will remember being small and the kind of place they will bring their own children one day.

The partnerships that last work the same way. Both sides protect the memory, not just the contract. The brand owner keeps the story honest while the operator keeps the experience worthy of it. When both sides do that, the offering evolves on its own, because you are listening to the families and not just the calendar.

But you do not manufacture that. You earn it one memory at a time, and then you protect it like it matters. Because to that family, it is the most important thing you make.

I will be talking more about all of this at the IAAPA Education ‘The Power of IP: How Brands Drive Attendance, Engagement, and Growth in LBE’ webinar on October 13. Hope you will join us.

Niko Nickolaou is Senior Director of Special Events and Creative at Gaylord Hotels, Marriott International, where he leads the ice! platform across eight destination resorts welcoming tens of millions of guests since opening. He sits on the Board of Directors for the Themed Entertainment Association Eastern North America and is a published author.