The man who built Emirates into a global brand signs off

Mike Simon has succeeded in connecting the airline with a host of sport sponsorships.

Mike Simon, the departing head of marketing for Emirates, has retired after making the airline a household name around the world.

As the head of Emirates Airline's marketing department for the past two decades, Mike Simon has seen his share of awards and plaudits, but possibly the highest praise he has received recently came from a London cab driver. Mr Simon told the driver he was going to Arsenal, the home stadium of the Arsenal Football Club, which Emirates Airline won the naming rights to in 2004. The cabbie replied, "Oh, the Emirates?" and went on to say, after learning that Mr Simon worked for the airline: "Oh well, I was in Dubai last week playing golf. I flew your airline. Not bad." "Not bad" may seem like faint praise, but the cabbie's ability to effortlessly connect Arsenal, Emirates and Dubai was proof that Mr Simon had succeeded in turning Emirates into one of the world's great brands and, in the process, helped to educate the world about just what and where Dubai was. For Mr Simon, who retired last week at the age of 71, it was a crowning achievement. "Of course, initially when I arrived, nobody had ever heard of Emirates and nobody had ever heard of Dubai," he recalled in a recent interview. "But I would like to think now, if you take away the American airlines and just focus on the international airlines, we have possibly the strongest brand of any airline. So it's been quite a ride." Travel has been a driving force in Mr Simon's long and varied career. His office was wallpapered with photographs from all over the world taken on his Nikon 35mm camera, which he refuses to give up despite also owning a digital camera that he uses to take snapshots of his five grandchildren. He started his career as a reporter for the Eastern Daily Press newspaper in his native UK. After completing his national service in the British Army, during which he met his wife of 49 years who was an officer in the Norwegian military, he returned to the UK to work as an information officer for the army. Finding communications to be his strength, he joined a public relations agency and then moved to Stockholm to run his own advertising agency. Among that agency's biggest clients was Scandinavian Airlines. "I got into this love affair with aeroplanes, and that's why I'm sitting here today," Mr Simon said. The agency held the Scandinavian Airlines account for 15 years, during which time he wrote such poetic lines of advertising copy as: "Chase the sun west with the Trans-Asian Express." When his agency lost the account, Mr Simon took a job as the advertising and promotions manager of Gulf Air. Seven years later, in 1989, he was living in semi-retirement in Cyprus, where he still has a home, and mulling a job offer from Emirates. After one visit to Dubai to survey the scene, he reported back to his wife that the job appeared to be "a doddle". "They've got about four or five aircraft and I can do it with my left hand tied behind my back, no problem," he told her, remembering that they both agreed it seemed like a pleasant way to end his career. "So the first year, we opened eight new destinations," Mr Simon said. When he asked his boss what happened, his boss replied: "Oh, I forgot to tell you, we're in a rather expansive mood at the moment." "And we continued in an expansive mood for the next so many years," Mr Simon said. "We've opened eight or nine destinations every year I've been here." Today, Emirates has 101 destinations and 128 aircraft, with dozens more on order. "So it's grown by leaps and bounds," he said. One of the challenges of his job has been to keep the brand expanding at the same rate as the airline, and one of his primary methods for doing this was through sport sponsorship. "We've sponsored probably more sporting events than any other airline in the world; maybe more than any other company," Mr Simon said. The airline started with horse racing, since that was a particular passion of the family that owns the airline, but today it sponsors a wide range of golf, cricket, rugby and football events and teams. Mr Simon was responsible for the airline signing its sponsorship deal with Chelsea ­Football Club. "After Chelsea, we went to Arsenal and sponsored not only the stadium, but the football shirts as well," he said. "Now we are one of six major sponsors of FIFA. It's gone on and on. People often ask me what don't you sponsor, and I say, 'Well, we haven't sponsored tiddlywinks'." The success of the sponsorship model means that Emirates has a much larger percentage of its marketing budget going to the deals than usual. "In the old days, advertising was about 70 per cent of the budget and PR was about 30 per cent," Mr Simon said. "Today, you will find out that it's almost 55 per cent sponsorship and 45 per cent ­advertising." The company is happy to do it, he says, because its research shows that sponsorships do pay. One recent report on the airline's sponsorship of Australia's horse racing event of the year, the Melbourne Cup, for example, showed an investment return of six to one. "We would like it to be eight to one, but that would be dreaming," Mr Simon said. Sometimes, of course, it's one to one, and in those cases, they end the sponsorship. "Sometimes you goof," he said. "One of the goofs that I made was we chose the football referees in the UK." The decision was based on the success of sponsoring the shirts of the umpires in cricket, but the patches on the UK football referees' shirts were so small that they were virtually invisible on television. "So we decided to pull out," he said. "It was a shame." Despite the tough economic times, Emirates has no plans to ­reduce its sponsorships. "We won't pull back on marketing," Mr Simon said. "This is an airline that believes in marketing." Marketing, which once made up 2.3 per cent of Emirates' budget, today takes up about 2.7 per cent, which, Mr Simon noted, "is an enormous amount to be spending on marketing and communications". In his retirement, Mr Simon plans to shift his communications work from approving press releases to writing novels. He has already self-published one, The Godstone, has another one at the printers and another in the works. He also plans to spend more time taking photographs. "I've got so many books I want to write, so many places to see," he said. Among those places, ironically enough, is his native UK, where he has not spent as much time as he would have liked, despite his globe-trotting career. He admits, though, that he has never been a big fan of being strapped into an aircraft. "I don't like flying," he said. "But I like getting there." [e-mail]