Strengthening skills, broadening horizons and forging links: these are the objectives at the heart of the partnership between Swiss Marketing Léman and HEC Lausanne's Executive Education programme. By joining forces, these two key players in the French-speaking world intend to meet the growing expectations of their respective communities: access to high added-value content, meetings with professionals who share the same challenges, and a stimulating environment that transcends academic and associative boundaries.
In this interview, Yves-Alain Schwaar (Swiss Marketing Léman) and Thomas Rouaud (Executive Education HEC Lausanne) discuss the motivations, concrete contributions and initial actions of this forward-looking collaboration.
Before talking about the collaboration itself, can you tell us a little about what your respective organisations stand for and who they are aimed at?
Yves-Alain (Swiss Marketing Léman)
Swiss Marketing Léman is the Léman branch of the umbrella association Swiss Marketing. Our association offers its members activities to help them improve their professional knowledge and expand their network in French-speaking Switzerland. It does this through events, webinars and various publications. Membership of the association entitles you to take part in all the events organised by Swiss Marketing's various regional clubs in Switzerland.
Swiss Marketing is the professional umbrella association for the marketing and sales sectors. It brings together the specialist knowledge of around 2,000 specialists and executives from a wide range of sectors. Swiss Marketing also organises professional examinations and higher professional examinations in marketing and sales (federal diplomas).
Thomas Rouaud (Executive Education HEC Lausanne)
Executive Education at HEC Lausanne offers continuing education programmes for professionals wishing to enhance their managerial, strategic or technical skills, while reconciling their professional life with personal development. We mainly target executives, managers and specialists who want to develop their careers. Every year, the Certificate in Marketing, Strategy and Digital brings together a variety of profiles, all driven by the desire to update their skills in a constantly changing environment.
What expectations have your audiences expressed that led you to consider this collaboration?
Yves-Alain
Our members appreciate the events and meetings organised by Swiss Marketing. Working with Executive Education HEC Lausanne will enable our association to benefit from contact with former and current students of your school, and to offer them other event formats as well as cutting-edge training.
Thomas Rouaud
Our participants and alumni regularly tell us that they want to continue to learn, meet and exchange ideas well beyond the course itself. They are looking for concrete opportunities to network, but also to put what they have learned into practice in a stimulating context. The collaboration with Swiss Marketing Léman was a natural response to this need: to bring together professionals who share the same interests around innovative formats and high added-value content.
What benefits will this partnership bring to your respective audiences?
Yves-Alain
The extension of the events and training courses available, an extended professional network, enriching exchanges between the respective audiences.
Thomas Rouaud
For our alumni, this collaboration is an opportunity to join a wider network, structured around marketing professionals working in different sectors. This enables them to share experiences, develop joint projects and continue their training through dynamic, concrete and practice-oriented events. For Swiss Marketing, it's also an opportunity to enrich its ecosystem with recently trained professionals who bring new approaches to the table.
Can you give us an initial example of a forthcoming joint action?
Yves-Alain
At the start of the 2025 academic year, we will be organising a markethon, a new format of event, exchange and learning based on a concrete marketing case to be solved in teams, with a jury and a winning team.
Thomas Rouaud
Yes, together we're going to launch a markethon in September 2025. It's an original format, somewhere between a challenge and collaborative training, where teams made up of alumni and members of Swiss Marketing will work on a real-life marketing case. It will be a great opportunity to put everyone's skills into practice, but also to create links and commitment.
In two or three years' time, how would you like this collaboration to be perceived by your audiences?
Yves-Alain
We hope that our target audiences will have seen an increase in the number of high-quality events and training courses they are able to attend, and that they will also have been able to enrich their professional network through rewarding and fruitful encounters.
Thomas Rouaud
I'd like our alumni and members of Swiss Marketing Léman to see this collaboration as a real catalyst for opportunities. Not only in terms of continuing education, but also as a natural gateway to maintain their professional momentum. If, through this initiative, we help to strengthen the professional marketing fabric in French-speaking Switzerland, then this partnership will have fully achieved its objective.
What do you think makes this partnership a success?
Yves-Alain
If the target audiences of both partners perceive a clear added value from this collaboration.
Thomas Rouaud
We can only talk about success if our audiences see a real long-term benefit: increasing participation in events, active involvement in joint projects, and above all, a feeling of belonging to a professional community that is growing together. Collaboration should not be seen as a series of isolated events, but as a common thread running through their professional careers.
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