Cook’s Pest Control Brand Guidelines: A 1928 Decatur Termite Firm & Cookie the Cop

A Decatur termite business and a five-year guarantee.

Cook’s Pest Control was founded in 1928 in Decatur, Alabama, by John L. Cook. It did not start under the family name. The company’s history page gives its first name as North Alabama Termite Control; a 13 February 2018 article by Samford University, the Birmingham-area university where the current chief executive studied, gives it as North Alabama Termite Company. Both agree on the founder, the town and the year, and Samford adds that the company has been headquartered in Decatur since it began.

The second generation reshaped the business. In 1950 the founder’s son, John R. Cook, took over the company’s leadership. The company says he gave up a promising career in architecture to do so, partly to honour the five-year termite guarantees his father had sold, and describes him as a Georgia Tech graduate who did much to advance the science of pest control in the firm.

Under John R. Cook the company widened its trade and took its family name. Samford reports that he added pest control to the company’s mission and changed the name to Cook’s Pest Control; the company dates the change to the early 1950s and says the new name arrived with its first official logo. He went on to serve as president of the Alabama Pest Control Association and of the National Pest Control Association, the company says, and in 2001 the national association, by then the National Pest Management Association, gave him its President’s Pinnacle Award.

John R. Cook and his wife, Jo Cook, also began a small collection of wildlife exhibits in a room of the company warehouse, the company says. That collection grew into the Cook’s Natural Science Museum, and later into the separate, non-profit Cook Museum of Natural Science in downtown Decatur, where ground was broken in 2015; English Wikipedia says the museum opened in 2018.

Lookie, lookie, lookie: a policeman for a mascot.

Cook’s mascot came from local television. The company’s history says that in 1965 a television station in Huntsville, Alabama, asked Cook’s to sponsor a children’s programme. John R. Cook, whom the company calls “a master marketer,” suggested a host in the style of a Keystone Cop, and a Cook’s employee, Jim Kearney, became “Cookie the Cop.”

The character was meant to be comic and friendly, and to stand for the watchful service the company promised, its history says. Cookie the Cop soon became more than a host: he became the company mascot and part of its colourful logo, and he appeared in long-running advertising spots across the Southeast with a jingle that ran, “Lookie, lookie, lookie … here comes Cookie. Cook’s Pest Control.”

The company has written its own story down. It has published a history titled Employee Number 2 – The story of John Cook and Cook’s Pest Control, and its website lays out the decades on a timeline from 1928 to its first Florida office in Pensacola.

The services are described in plain categories. The website groups its residential work under general pest control, termite control, mosquito and tick control and bed bug control, and offers commercial programmes for facilities, including rodent, fly, bird and stored-product pest control. Its technicians train through Cook’s Academy, an in-house programme with classroom, computer-based and field instruction; the company opened a dedicated training facility in Decatur in 2015, its history says. The company also says its entomologists have university-level training in the identification, biology and habits of more than 50 insects and other pests common to the region.

How the trade presents itself.

A pest-control brand is mostly met in working places rather than in shops: on the side of a service van, on a technician’s shirt, on a branch sign, on a service agreement and on an invoice. When Rentokil Initial bought Western Exterminator in 2012, the seller’s president told the Orange County Register that customers would “still see our trucks” and the same people at the door. The companies themselves publish these vehicles, uniforms and branch pages as the public face of the business, so a guide to the category starts there.

Some of the older American firms lean on a character or a family name. Western Exterminator’s little man with a big hammer has been in use long enough to be parodied on The Simpsons in 1995, according to English Wikipedia, while Ehrlich still carries the surname of the man who started it in Reading in 1928.

Service plans are the other naming layer. A company that sells recurring visits gives its plans names, and those names sit beside the company name on websites, quotes and contracts; they have to read clearly in small type and stay consistent with the main mark. This guide looks at names, marks and colour as the companies present them, and does not reproduce any logo, livery or uniform.

Behind many local names sits a larger owner. Rentokil Initial’s 2012 annual report lists Ehrlich, Presto-X and Western as “country-specific” brands under one shared brand essence, and its 2025 report describes keeping 30 pest brands, national, regional and local, in North America. Corporate pages on owners, acquisitions and branch networks are therefore part of how these brands present themselves, and each guide notes who owns the name today.

A family company across six Southern states.

Cook’s has stayed in the family. Samford University reported in February 2018 that Brian Cook, the founder’s great-grandson, had been named president and chief executive in 2017, after his father had led the company following John R. Cook. Samford described Cook’s at that point as “the seventh largest pest control company in the U.S.” with more than 1,750 employees and 36 offices in five states; the company’s own history says John R. Cook once helped make it America’s eighth-largest. The same Samford article notes that Cook’s funds a Cook’s Pest Control Scholarship at the university’s Brock School of Business, and that Brian Cook chairs the board of the Cook Museum of Natural Science.

The footprint has grown since. The Chattanooga Times Free Press reported on 14 July 2023 that Cook’s had moved its Chattanooga operations into the largest of its 40 branch offices across the Southeast, half a century after it first entered that market in 1972, and called Brian Cook the fourth-generation leader of the 95-year-old, family-owned business. The company’s website now lists branches in Alabama, Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, Mississippi and Tennessee.

The company speaks openly about faith. Its about page says that Cook’s “has been dedicated to God,” and lists its values as stewardship, gratitude, integrity, excellence, generosity and respect; Samford noted that the family has run the company on Biblical values. The site calls Cook’s “The South’s Most Trusted Name in Pest Control,” offers what it calls a 110% Satisfaction Guarantee, and says the company received the Better Business Bureau’s National Torch Award for Marketplace Ethics.

For a design guide, Cook’s Pest Control shows how a regional firm can build a lasting identity from a single local television character and a family name. Compare Orkin, another pest control name based in the American South, and Arrow Exterminators, a pest control company based in Atlanta. For this guide we use patrol blue, badge gold and cotton with a slab serif, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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