Tourism Bureau Debuts ‘TuscaLife’ Brand Campaign to Encourage Exploring Tuscaloosa

A vibrant new brand campaign unveiled on Thursday aims to encourage exploring all Tuscaloosa has to offer, highlighting its most-known features and best-kept secrets under one new colorful umbrella.

Visit Tuscaloosa, the tourism bureau tasked with drawing guests to the area for experiences they'll want to repeat, debuted the new 'TuscaLife' campaign at a Thursday morning event.

Jimmy Hart, the Vice President of Marketing for Visit Tuscaloosa, said the brand campaign isn't a renaming or a refresh of their organization.

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"We will continue to be Visit Tuscaloosa. Our website will continue to be visittuscaloosa.com. You'll continue to see our reds, golds and teals and our logo as you always have," Hart explained. "But a brand is a lot more than a logo, it encompasses a lot more than just a visual identity."

"As brands mature, they begin to take on other things - taglines, sonic identities - we get more sophisticated at every turn," Hart continued. "But more than that, we need to develop a brand promise. We need to develop expectations among our audience. We need for potential Tuscaloosa visitors and investors to understand there is something in our community that they're not going to be able to find anywhere else. It's not just worth their time, but it's worth their passion and hopefully worth their dollars to invest in our city."

Enter TuscaLife, a new brand campaign developed in partnership with Madden Media, a tourism marketing agency that developed and presented the concept in collaboration with Visit Tuscaloosa.

"We really wanted to figure out what emotion we wanted to evoke when visitors come, and ultimately we came out with belonging," said Madden's Emily Gonzales. "People, when they come to Tuscaloosa, they should feel like part of the family. They're seen, they're accepted, they're safe, they're connected, they're supported. And what's the one thing we need to tell them? Tuscaloosa doesn't have something for everyone. It has something for you."

The broader TuscaLife campaign has six central pillars sticking to the same theme - TuscaLakes, TuscaLoyal, TuscaLively, TuscaLicious, TuscaLuxury and TuscaLegend. Each pillar will come with hyper-focused branding and advertising, respectively highlighting the area's aquatic recreation, college athletics, frequent events, legendary local restaurants, upscale offerings and rich history.

The offshoots offered under the TuscaLife umbrella are numerous, Gonzales said - TuscaLocal for the longtime residents, TuscaLattes at the coffee shop, TuscaLagers for the hops lovers.

The debut also came with new merchandise to highlight the brand - swag. was on-site to screenprint shirts and cutomize ballcaps for attendees in real-time. Peterbrooke Chocolatier created a TuscaLife milk chocolate disk, Poppin' Sisters debuted a new flavor of popcorn, and Druid City Brewing Company showed off the new TuscaLicious Mexican lager.

"What I get to do in marketing and communications is most often about audiences - not particular individuals, but large groups of people that we know we have the opportunity to influence, whether that's to visit our community, to attend an event in our community, or to consider our community as a place where they would want to spend four to seven to 10 years of college," Hart explained. "These are all different audiences that are important for us to speak to, but need to be spoken to in different ways."

So this promotional campaign will have something for the lake lovers, and for the foodies, and for the Crimson Tide superfans - all different types of people, and all who can find something to love in Tuscaloosa.

For more about the campaign, check out Visit Tuscaloosa's website here, and for more news from West Alabama, stay connected to the Tuscaloosa Thread.