A farmer turned salesman and a company for Illinois drivers.

State Farm was founded in Bloomington, Illinois, in 1922 by George J. Mecherle. A biography published by the American National Business Hall of Fame, written by Richard Hattwick and drawing on Karl Schriftgiesser’s 1955 company history The Farmer from Merna, describes Mecherle as a farmer from the country outside Bloomington who left farming, returned to the town and took a job as a salesman for an automobile insurance company.

That job, the biography says, gave him ideas for new, low-cost policies, which his employer did not take up; he left to sell tractors, but kept returning to the insurance plan. The concept he settled on was a company organised on mutual principles that would sell automobile insurance to farmers throughout Illinois, restricting its policyholders to a group of drivers he considered lower risk. The biography says friends warned him against the venture, pointing to a Bloomington insurance company that had recently failed, and that Herman Ekern, an insurance lawyer Mecherle consulted in Chicago, pointed out flaws in the plan before Mecherle went ahead.

The company’s full name described exactly that plan: State Farm Mutual Automobile Insurance Company. The Hall of Fame biography says the new company was incorporated on 29 March 1922, after which Mecherle took to the country roads to sign up applicants; once he and fellow salesmen had gathered enough applications to satisfy the State of Illinois licence requirement, the company held its organisational meeting on 8 June 1922. Wikipedia gives the founding date as 7 June 1922 and describes State Farm as a mutual automobile insurance company owned by its policyholders, founded by a retired farmer.

Bloomington remained the company’s home. Wikipedia gives the corporate headquarters as Bloomington and records the company’s “Fire Building” in downtown Bloomington. It lists George J. Mecherle as head of the company from 1922 to 1937 and his son Raymond Mecherle from 1937 to 1954.

Ovals, a mutual group and a single logo for auto, fire and life.

State Farm remains a group of mutual insurance companies, Wikipedia says, with corporate headquarters in Bloomington, Illinois. Wikipedia describes the company Mecherle organised in 1922 as a mutual automobile insurer owned by its policyholders, and the State Farm name has stayed with that group since.

Its visual identity is built on ovals. Wikipedia says State Farm used an interlocked tri-oval logo from 1953 until 31 December 2011. On 15 December 2011, Wikipedia says, citing a State Farm press release of that date, the company announced that it was changing the logo to showcase its core offerings of auto, fire and life insurance in a contemporary form.

The new logo was introduced on 1 January 2012, in celebration of the company’s 90th anniversary, Wikipedia says. It consists of a simple three-oval design with no wording in the ovals, placed next to the State Farm wordmark. Wikipedia quotes Pam El, then marketing vice president at State Farm, as saying that a change in image was needed to give the company a bolder presence that could compete in the digital world.

Design and documentation.

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 jingle, a neighbour and Jake.

A large part of State Farm’s identity is musical. The Saturday Evening Post reported on 4 October 2018 that the jingle “Like a good neighbor, State Farm is there” was written by Barry Manilow at the start of his career, in 1971, during the years when he wrote and sang jingles for several brands, among them “Stuck on Band-Aid”. The same article said the lyrics were not then in use in State Farm advertising, having been dropped two years earlier for a campaign built on the line “Here to help life go right”, but that State Farm still used the nine-note hook Manilow wrote, by then as a lo-fi, 16-bit soundtrack. Wikipedia also credits the jingle to Manilow in 1971, and says the band Weezer released a cover of it in 2011, citing Prefix magazine of 10 February 2011.

The line itself became the basis of whole campaigns. Wikipedia describes a series launched in 2011 in which people in difficulty sing the jingle and a State Farm agent appears beside them, and it describes a 2024 Super Bowl spot, “Like a Good Neighbaaa”, in which Arnold Schwarzenegger struggles to pronounce the word “neighbor” until Danny DeVito helps him. Between those, in late 2014, Wikipedia says, citing Adweek of 11 December 2014, State Farm released a spot in which a man insists he will “never” marry, have children, move to the suburbs or buy a minivan, then does each in turn, before admitting at the end that he is “never letting go”.

The other recurring character is Jake from State Farm. Wikipedia says he debuted in a 2011 commercial, “State of Unrest”, in which a man on the phone late at night tells his suspicious wife that he is talking to “Jake from State Farm”; that original Jake was played by Jake Stone, an actual State Farm employee. In 2020, Wikipedia says, citing the Chicago Tribune, actor Kevin Miles took over the role; his Jake wears a red shirt and khakis, and has appeared in commercials alongside celebrities. In 2025, Wikipedia says, citing CBR in March 2025, State Farm ran a Batman vs. Bateman campaign in which Jake explains the difference between getting Batman and getting the actor Jason Bateman.

For a design guide, State Farm shows how a colour, a simple geometric mark and a short melody can hold a brand together over decades of campaigns. Compare Allstate and Nationwide. For this guide we use oval red, field linen and porch white with a plain sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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