The Big Dog Goes on a PR Tour

From Insurance Journal:

Representatives of State Farm Insurance Co. are on a media tour in Mississippi to give a more positive image to the company as it and others in the industry fend off lawsuits filed in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina.[...]

Mississippi Insurance Commissioner George Dale said State Farm’s public relations campaign should have begun last year after the storm nearly turned the Gulf Coast into a wasteland.

“They’ve done the poorest job of PR than any I’ve ever seen,” Dale said. “There are untold hundreds of people who have been paid by State Farm, but they’ve allowed the ones that didn’t get their claims paid to paint them with the same brush and they did nothing to try to offset that.

The IJ piece includes a few post-Katrina anecdotes as well.

One of the hard things about working in the insurance industry is that it’s too easy to portray insurers as evil. We sell a piece of paper and a guarantee, and the times a consumer is most likely to deal with us are when we’re attempting to sell you a product you may not want to think about, when we’re asking for money (collecting premium) or under the stressful situation of an accident/storm/loss.

While it is true, many insurers are in the business to make money, and a few of us are not shy about being capitalists, there are many of us in the industry who don’t think that cruelty necessarily goes along with profit-seeking.

Sadly, we don’t always do the best job of getting that concept out into the public for a.