Sears named it before it was an insurer.

The name came before the company. English Wikipedia, citing the Sears archives, says that in 1925 Sears, Roebuck and Co. held a national contest to name a new line of car tires, and that “Allstate” was the winning entry, sent in by Hans Simonson of Bismarck, North Dakota. For six years the word belonged to tires sold through Sears stores and the Sears catalog.

The insurer followed in 1931. Wikipedia says the idea came from an insurance broker, Carl L. Odell, who suggested to his neighbour Robert E. Wood, the head of Sears, that car insurance could be sold by direct mail; the Sears board approved the plan, and the Allstate Insurance Company began business on April 17, 1931, selling car insurance by mail and through the Sears catalog under the name of the tire line. In 1934, Wikipedia says, it opened a permanent sales office inside a Sears store in Chicago.

That start explains much of the early identity. Allstate was not a separate name on a separate street; it was a Sears brand, sold at a counter inside a Sears shop and printed in the same catalog as the tires that had carried the word first. In 1952 and 1953, Wikipedia adds, Sears even sold a car called the Allstate, based on the Henry J built by Kaiser, and the Allstate name also appeared on tires, batteries and other goods before it settled on insurance.

The company moved its home office from Skokie to Northbrook, Illinois, in 1967, according to Wikipedia, and the Northbrook name has stayed on its address since; Wikipedia gives its headquarters as a site in Glenview with a Northbrook address from 2022.

A slogan, a gesture and a voice.

The company’s slogan dates from 1950. English Wikipedia says the line “You’re in good hands with Allstate” was written that year by the company’s general sales manager, Davis W. Ellis, who based it on a phrase he had used to reassure his wife about a doctor caring for their child. The hands that go with the words were a separate piece of work: Wikipedia credits the original hands logo to Theodore Conterio in the 1950s, saying employees were invited to suggest a design and that his, drawn from the slogan, won a small staff prize.

The gesture reached television through an announcer. The Los Angeles Times reported in August 2009 that Ed Reimers was Allstate’s television spokesman for 22 years beginning in 1957, cupping his hands as he delivered the slogan at the end of each commercial. The paper added that he also voiced Allstate radio commercials and appeared in print advertising making the same cupped-hand gesture. For a generation of viewers, then, the mark was not only a drawing on a policy but a pair of real hands held out to the camera at the close of each spot.

The words have since been reworked rather than replaced. In May 2016 Advertising Age reported that Allstate was refreshing its tagline to “It’s good to be IN Good Hands,” with a new campaign from Leo Burnett, a “new look and feel” described by the company’s marketing chief, and spots featuring Tim Gunn, Adam DeVine and Leslie Jones. Each spot, the magazine said, ended on the new line voiced by Dennis Haysbert, who had been a spokesman for the company since 2003 and in that campaign was heard rather than seen.

Haysbert’s deep voice and the cupped hands carry the same idea a long way apart in time: a calm figure at the end of the commercial, telling the viewer they are looked after. Allstate also calls itself, Wikipedia notes, the “Good Hands People.”

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.

Mayhem, and the split from Sears.

Allstate’s second recurring character is the opposite of the reassuring announcer. In June 2011 the Chicago Tribune described Mayhem as the creation of Leo Burnett, the Chicago agency, and the insurer, and reported that Burnett’s original pitch, in March of the previous year, used a photo of Harvey Keitel as the sinister Mr. White in Reservoir Dogs to suggest what the character might be; in that presentation he was “Mr. Mayhem.” The actor Dean Winters told the paper he was offered the job in April of the previous year. Mayhem, the Tribune wrote, is always dressed in a suit with some fresh wound, and has played a deer by a dark road, a GPS unit that keeps “recalculating,” a car’s blind spot and a raccoon in an attic.

The pairing gives the brand two voices at once: the calm figure who says you are in good hands, and the cheerful figure of everything that can go wrong. Both, in the 2016 campaign Advertising Age described, fed back to the same line.

Ownership changed in the 1990s. On June 3, 1993, the Chicago Tribune reported that Sears had priced an initial public offering of shares in Allstate Corp., until then wholly owned by Sears, as part of its decision the previous year to spin off its financial-services units, including Dean Witter, and to sell up to a fifth of Allstate. English Wikipedia says Allstate became fully independent in June 1995, when Sears distributed its remaining stake to its own shareholders. The name that Sears had chosen for a tire in 1925 has since stood on its own as The Allstate Corporation, with its address in Northbrook.

For a design guide, Allstate shows how far one gesture can carry a brand: a slogan written in 1950, drawn as a pair of hands, acted out by an announcer from 1957, and kept as the closing line of commercials decades later. Compare State Farm, another Illinois insurer built around a single closing line, and Progressive, which built its advertising around a recurring character. For this guide we use a deep blue and white with a plain sans, an unofficial interpretation; no logo, hands device or advertisement is reproduced.

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