Product Offering Strategy

The Brief

The City of Lausanne and the State of Vaud are the home of nearly 60 international sports federations and organisations. While the city, known as the "Olympic Capital", already offers a wide range of services to these organisations, it was looking for ways to widen its offer by providing more targeted products to their "clients" in the international sports world.

Our Response

Our team of consultants looked at ways Lausanne could work on its status of becoming an intellectual "Silicone Valley" of sports. Indeed, while it is a fact that many international sports organisation have established their headquarters in the area, it was identified that more could be done in terms of sharing of knowledge and experience in sports management, between the organisations themselves. We proposed to initiate the process by organising a range of management training sessions for the executives and staff of all sports organisations based in the area. These sessions, each being half-day sessions, would enable participants to learn about the latest trends in sport management as well as share their own experiences. Topics were (amongst others):

• Human resources in sport: dealing with volunteers
• Turning your sport into a brand
• The basics of public relations in sport
• The basics of strategic planning in sport
• Improving personal performance

The objective of these sessions was not only for the participants to get new ideas and hints for their everyday work, but also to create a real forum for knowledge exchange amongst the managers from some of the most important sports organisations in the world, in a fun environment that would function as a strong motivational tool. The City of Lausanne, whilst being able to add a new concrete and useful offer to their product range, had at the same time prepared the ground for its new project: to become the sports management knowledge centre of the world.