A summer Thursday on the shores of Lake Geneva. I am in a salon in Lausanne’s plush Palace hotel talking to Temel Kotil, President and chief executive of Turkish Airlines.
We are just days away from the curtain being drawn on the airline’s sponsorship of Manchester United, arguably the world’s favourite football club (Aeroflot have become the club’s sponsor). Yet I don’t think I have ever met a business leader so bursting with enthusiasm about the effect sporting partnerships can have on multinational companies.
“Sponsoring sport is the smartest way to do marketing,” Kotil, a relatively short, moustachioed man with distinctive arching eyebrows, tells me.
“Because sport belongs to everybody; everybody likes it.
“It is common ground to communicate.”
The context of our meeting may be partly responsible for the energy of Kotil’s assertions.
The trained mechanical engineer is in town supporting Istanbul’s bid to stage the 2020 Olympic and Paralympic Games – and I can vouch from experience that there are few things like the Olympic circus in all its surreal majesty for getting the adrenalin pumping.
Yet the logic of what he says seems cogent enough – and the pages and pages of sponsorship releases on the airline’s website certainly demonstrate that the company practices what he preaches.
Here he is explaining how a Spanish deal can promote growth in the Far East.
“We sponsor Barcelona,” he says, Manchester United’s opponents in the 2011 European Cup final.
“In Hong Kong, children were telling me, ‘We love Turkish Airlines’ because we sponsor the club Lionel Messi plays for.”
Kotil is clearly most excited about a new deal with Borussia Dortmund, the German club known for the fervour of its fans, especially in full voice at the club’s magnificent Ruhrland stadium, and recently for overachieving with relatively sparse funds compared with the giants it has been felling regularly with its catapult.
As the media release states: “The football club stands for tradition, regional identity, hard work and success.”
It is the emotional dimension of the club that Kotil seems particularly to have latched on to.
“We need to find ways to inject that emotion into Turkish Airlines,” he tells me.
“Emotion is the biggest asset.”
While interviews with CEOs can be timid, cagey affairs, especially in the uncertain economic climate of recent times, there is nothing in the least bit bashful about Kotil’s growth projections for his industry.
A University of Michigan alumnus, he is armed with an iPad loaded with graphs and charts that I won’t attempt to reproduce.
But the underlying point, I think, is disarmingly simple: at the moment, around 3.1 billion people travel – say broadly half the world.
“In 30 years, everybody will travel.”
With confidence like that, no wonder Turkish Airlines flies to Mogadishu, and would like to fly to Juba.
Kotil, who has been to Somalia twice, sounds genuinely proud when explaining how the Somali diaspora has begun moving money back into the devastated country, in part because the presence of companies such as Turkish Airlines has led them to conclude that doing so must be safe.
Returning to sports sponsorship, I have a feeling that it won’t be too long before that Manchester United deal is replaced by a similarly high-profile new UK partnership.
The airline’s aim, Kotil tells me, is to have “one sports sponsorship in every main country we operate in”.
This doesn’t necessarily mean football – and, indeed, the Istanbul 2020 media release references the airline’s sponsorship of Kobe Bryant, the basketball star, and tennis-player Caroline Wozniacki.
But with Financial Fair Play at hand, I would be surprised if top clubs were not already beating a path to Kotil’s door.
David Owen worked for 20 years for the Financial Times in the United States, Canada, France and the UK. He ended his FT career as sports editor after the 2006 World Cup and is now freelancing, including covering the 2008 Beijing Olympics, the 2010 World Cup and London 2012. Owen’s Twitter feed can be accessed at www.twitter.com/dodo938