Biography|Jeremy Dale — Motorola Hired Him to Raise the Brand From This Hampshire Yard

People treat Jeremy Dale as a football-club executive who arrived from nowhere in 2023.

The paper trail starts twenty years earlier, on a light-industrial close south of Basingstoke.

On 11 May 2005 Campaign reported that Dale, lately of Orange UK, had joined Motorola as international vice-president of marketing.

The brief ran across four divisions: Connected Home, Government and Enterprise Mobility, Mobile Devices, and Networks.

He reported to Geoffrey Frost, the global chief marketing officer who had already made the RAZR V3 Motorola's face.

The V3 had shipped in late 2004. Dale's job was the international brand that had to carry that face into Europe, Asia, and football.

Motorola still employed hundreds at Jays Close on the Viables Industrial Estate, postcode RG22 4PD.

A bus stop on the close still bears the old name. Planning files from 2020 authorised demolition of the Motorola works for new industrial units.

The building as a Motorola campus is gone. The product is not.

By 2006 Dale was putting David Beckham on the same handset in Japan and China.

BBC Business later recorded the DoCoMo week when a RAZR went from no Japanese share to the top-selling handset.

A later profile in BirminghamLive placed him at Motorola through the RAZR years and then at Microsoft.

The yard on Jays Close was never glamorous.

It was where a Birmingham marketer took the brief that later let him talk to football owners as someone who had already sold a phone across continents.

Dale is living. This pin is a former workplace on a public industrial estate, not a home.

Photo: Motorola RAZR V3, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons