The Mighty Five Marketing Campaign, 2013

Nobody called them the Mighty Five before two thousand thirteen. The five national parks had existed for decades under their own names, and visitors found them by looking at maps or following road signs. Then the Utah Office of Tourism hired a marketing agency in Salt Lake City, and everything changed.

The campaign that came out of those meetings gave Utah's five parks a collective brand name, a visual identity, and the tagline "Life Elevated." The phrase "Utah's Mighty Five" was the centerpiece. It was designed to work on billboards, on social media, on travel-magazine spreads. It worked.

Zion National Park received two point eight million visitors in two thousand twelve. By two thousand sixteen, three years after the campaign launched, that number had risen to four point five million. The other parks saw comparable increases. The campaign is routinely cited as one of the most effective state tourism brands in American history, a description that is both accurate and complicated.

The infrastructure the parks had built for earlier visitor numbers could not absorb the surge. Trail wait times lengthened. Trailhead parking filled before dawn. Zion Canyon had implemented a shuttle-only system for private vehicles in two thousand, before the campaign; after it, the shuttle system had to expand dramatically. Angels Landing, one of the park's most-photographed trails, required a permit lottery starting in two thousand twenty-two after years of dangerous overcrowding.

The Mighty Five as a category is, among other things, a branding case study in how marketing shapes landscape experience. The parks it named are extraordinary. They are also, now, extraordinarily busy.