Three brothers in Columbus.

Aflac began in Columbus, Georgia, in 1955. The New Georgia Encyclopedia, in an entry by Lennet Daigle first published in 2005 and last modified in 2013, says the company was founded that year by the brothers John, Paul and William Amos and incorporated as the American Family Life Insurance Company. English Wikipedia adds that the name was changed in 1964 to the American Family Life Assurance Company of Columbus — the long form from which the short name was later made.

The encyclopedia traces two decisions that shaped the business. Beginning in 1964, it says, the company chose to focus its sales on the workplace, selling policies that employees paid for through payroll deductions. And the decision to sell abroad grew from John Amos’s visit to the 1970 Osaka World’s Fair; in 1974 the company, then still the American Family Life Assurance Company of Columbus, began selling insurance in Japan. Japan has remained central to the brand since, and the encyclopedia notes that the company later took its American advertising there too.

A holding company followed. The New Georgia Encyclopedia says American Family Life set up the American Family Corporation in 1973. From 1979 to 1997, English Wikipedia says, the group also owned television stations, mostly in small and medium markets, before selling its broadcasting division, including WTVM in Columbus, in 1997.

The headquarters stayed in Columbus. Wikipedia places the worldwide head office in a tower just east of downtown, in the area known as MidTown, and the Amos family stayed at the top of the company: the encyclopedia says Daniel Amos, Paul Amos’s son, became chief executive in 1990 and chair in 2001.

A name made from initials.

The word “Aflac” is an acronym turned into a name. The New Georgia Encyclopedia says that in 1989 the holding company adopted Aflac as its new trade name, and that American Family Life had been calling itself Aflac unofficially since 1988. The change, the encyclopedia says, set the company apart from the many others that included the word “American” in their names.

That choice matters for a design guide, because a coined word has no meaning of its own until someone gives it one. The encyclopedia credits advertising campaigns of the 1990s, launched under Daniel Amos, with spreading the name; the campaign that fixed it, however, gave the word a sound.

The duck arrived at the turn of the century. English Wikipedia says the duck has appeared in Aflac’s television commercials since December 1999, quacking the company’s name in frustration at people who cannot quite remember it; the New Georgia Encyclopedia says the company began an advertising campaign featuring a duck in 2000. Wikipedia credits the concept and the commercials to the Kaplan Thaler Group, a New York advertising agency, and says the ducklings used for filming came from Metzer Farms, a hatchery in Gonzales, California.

The joke is the brand. The duck says only one word, and that word is the company’s name; the white bird with an orange bill turns an acronym of initials into a sound that viewers repeat. The encyclopedia says that in 2001 Aflac used the same campaign in Japan, to promote an accident policy in that market, so the same character works in both of its markets.

Wikipedia adds that since 2001 Aflac and Macy’s have sold an annual holiday plush duck in some Macy’s stores, with proceeds going to children’s cancer facilities, which carries the character from the screen into the shop.

Characters, jingles and signage.

The brands in this group sell insurance: cover for cars, homes, health, income and lives. An insurer has no product to put on a shelf, so its identity has to live almost entirely in signs, sounds and paperwork — the name on an agent’s office window, a character in a television spot, a few notes of music that close an advertisement, and the letterhead on a policy that may sit in a drawer for years.

Mascots and spokespeople do much of the work in this category. A recurring character or a familiar voice gives a brand something to show where there is nothing to hold, and a short sung line can carry a name further than any logo. Agent-office signage repeats the mark street by street, often in a fixed colour and a set lockup, while policy documents, cards and claim forms carry the same mark into the home.

Each guide separates what independent sources record from what the company says about itself — who started the brand, who owns it now, and how its logos, characters and advertising have changed — and marks plainly what rests only on the company’s own word.

A new voice, and a cartoon cameo.

A character that speaks only one word still needs a voice. The comedian Gilbert Gottfried voiced the duck from the start of the campaign, and in March 2011 the Associated Press, in a report carried by NBC News, said Aflac had dismissed him after he made remarks on Twitter about the earthquake and tsunami in Japan. Aflac then opened the part to the public: the AP reported that it would accept 30-second audio or video files of people’s own version of the duck’s “Aflac” squawk through a website, quackaflac.com, and that a 2006 commercial showing the duck in a silent movie, without any voice at all, had been re-edited to promote the search.

The episode shows how much of the brand sits in the sound. The company’s marketing chief at the time, Michael Zuna, told the AP that Aflac wanted to hear interpretations of the character that might differ from Gottfried’s, and a job posting quoted in the same report described the role as translating complex messages into a single word.

The duck has also been lent to other characters. In September 2017 Variety reported an advertising arrangement under which the Aflac duck would appear in a commercial with Donald Duck and his nephews Huey, Dewey and Louie, built around Disney’s revived DuckTales cartoon. Earlier commercials, Wikipedia says, paired it with Looney Tunes characters and with sports and entertainment figures.

For a design guide, Aflac shows how a coined name can be fixed in memory by giving it a voice: initials from a long company name, turned into a word in 1988–1989, then turned into a sound by a duck. Compare GEICO, another insurer whose name began as initials and whose advertising leans on an animal character, and Allstate, whose identity was built around a slogan and a gesture. For this guide we use a deep blue, white and an orange with a rounded sans, an unofficial interpretation; no logo, character or advertisement is reproduced.

Keep Aflac’s identity on hand — save it to a board in the Made Good inspiration library.