Brand Arabia

From property to media and finance to airlines, Arab companies are taking the global stage by storm.

Mike Simon is more used to mixing with heads of state and royalty, but it was a chance encounter with a London cab driver that made him realise what success is.

"He asked me where I'd come from. I said Dubai. He said ‘Ah, that's where Emirates Airline is, isn't it?'" says Simon.

For Simon, who has run Emirates Airline's communications department for nearly 20 years, that was the moment that proved all the hard work had been worth it. An Arab company, conceived and built up out of Dubai, was now a global player and a global brand - equally recognisable on the streets of Riyadh and Rio.

Emirates isn't the only Arab company to become a global household name. Broadcaster Al Jazeera Network was ranked the world's fifth most influential brand in a 2004 Interbrand survey. Its English and Arabic news channels, coming out of Doha in Qatar, are now major players in the 24-hour rolling news industry.

Hotel group Jumeirah International - behind the landmark Burj Dubai hotel, has taken London and New York by storm with new developments. Emaar meanwhile, which is constructing the world's tallest building in Dubai, is soon to list on the London Stock Exchange for US$40 billion - instantly propelling, for the first time ever, an Arab company into the upper echelons of the coveted FTSE100.

Saudi Arabia's Prince Alwaleed's Kingdom Holdings now has stakes in 40 companies across the globe including Apple Computers, Hewlett-Packard, The Walt Disney Co and eBay.

Brand Arabia, it would seem, is now a worldwide phenomenon, with at least 25 other major Arab companies preparing to take their place on the global business stage in the next two years.

But getting here has been no easy journey. For both Al Jazeera and Emirates the task of marketing an Arab brand in the west has been a big challenge.

"Terror TV," is how the many people in the western world once viewed broadcaster Al Jazeera, according to Nigel Parsons, managing director of Al Jazeera English.

The network has now achieved its target of reaching 100 million households worldwide after taking the daring step of launching a 24-hour English language Arab news channel across the world in 2006.

But, says Parsons, it first had to overcome the scepticism surrounding its launch and its reputation, in some parts of the world, particularly in the US, as a mouthpiece for terrorists.

"The mood in the US has definitely changed towards us now," he says. "They want to engage with us and we're seen as a serious news organisation whereas before we were seen as some kind of terror TV. There were a lot of sceptics before we launched. People said we couldn't do it."

Ultimately, however, he says Al Jazeera's notoriety has been a driving force behind the success of its global English language launch.

Because as he points out, no publicity is bad publicity.

"We were helped a lot by having a well-known brand. In some parts of the world the image was negative and in some parts of the world very positive. But the worst thing in the world actually is to be unknown so to have a strong brand was a huge help in many ways. And that's why we were in so many homes by launch. It was 80 million at launch and we're past the 100 million households now. That's a huge achievement."

Although Parsons admits it has not yet fully conquered the American market, a mark of its success is that Al Jazeera English is currently the most watched news channel on the internet site YouTube and half of its internet traffic is from the US.

"We've got a fairly limited distribution there (in the US). Probably about two million households across the country, but we're also the leading news channel on YouTube by a long way and half of our internet traffic tends to come from the US," Parsons goes on to say.

He reveals that Al Jazeera is about to greatly increase its penetration into the US market when it signs "significant carriage deals" in the US later this year.

"I'm fairly confident that we'll be announcing substantial deals in the US within certainly the first half of this year. This will give us much greater penetration into the US market via television rather than relaying so heavily on channels such as YouTube or the internet."

When introducing Emirates to the rest of the world almost two decades ago Mike Simon's biggest challenge was promoting flights to a destination many people in the Western world didn't even know existed, and then persuading them to board an Arab jet.

"Many years ago when I first arrived people had never heard of Dubai. When you talked about Dubai people just gave you a blank look. So initially we had the joint job of promoting Emirates and Dubai."

The days of Dubai's anonymity are long gone. Fifteen million tourists a year are expected to visit the emirate by 2010. In the financial year 2006/07 17.5million passengers flew with Emirates, which now covers 99 destinations worldwide.

For 2006 it reported revenue of US$8.1billion and it is expected to report another year of record profits for 2007. In 1985, Emirates Airline didn't even exist. Earlier this year the influential USA Today newspaper predicted it was on course to overtake American Airlines to become the world's biggest airline.

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