Our Visit to Lausanne

Hello to all those in the midwest,

Our three days in Lausanne were a new experience for everyone. For me, it presented an opportunity to see what a 'real' Swiss city was like. Lausanne is what some would call a workers city. There aren't tourists everywhere and there certainly aren't a lot of tourists attractions to see in the city, but our class made the best of the city. We took advantage of the Olympic Museum and most notably many many trips to Switzerland's most popular supermarket, Denner. We all found Switzerland to be extremely expensive with a typical dinner at a restaurant costing well over twenty Swiss Franks per person. We also experienced two lectures from two professors who are well integrated into the Olympics tradition.

Our first speaker was Professor Jean-Loup Chappelet from the University of Lausanne. He seemed to have great connections into the International Olympic Committee and we found through his resume that he indeed does. He has been to every Summer Olympics since 1972 with the exception of 1988 and he's been to every Winter Olympics since 1980 except for 1988, the year his child was born. In this lecture we learned a lot about the Olympic Movement or as Professor Chappelet called it, the Olympic System. The Olympic Movement is the structure of the IOC regarding the entire process of organizing the Games. We have learned that there must be much communication between the IOC, National Olympic Committees, International Federations (ex. FIFA), Organizing Committees (committee of individual games), and National Federations. This is a very complex structure that we have also found is changing all the time. There are always new 'actors' coming into play for the IOC. Most notably, new 'extreme' sports as well as 'doping', a phenomenon we have largely seen in baseball in the United States. Professor Chappelet did an excellent job with his lecture and he clarified many things for the entire group.

Our second speaker, Professor Benoit Seguin, is from the University of Ottawa in Ottawa, Canada and is doing his sabbatical in Lausanne, Switzerland. He primarily spoke to us about marketing in the Olympics, in particular a subject called Ambush Marketing. Until 1984, the Olympic Games in Los Angeles, the IOC had largely been opposed to marketing in the Olympic Games. Now, all we see in the Olympic Games is marketing from Coca Cola, McDonalds, and Visa, the primary sponsors. What many don't know is that the top sponsors have special rights that other companies don't have. For instance, Subway often airs commercials that closely associate Michael Phelps with the Olympics, but this is illegal as we found out today. This is what we call Ambush Marketing which is defined as, 'efforts of an organization to associate itself indirectly with an event in an effort to reap the same benefits as an official sponsor'. We often see commercials that do this, but we will find that this may slowly change due to the governments of Olympic nations developing laws preventing companies from doing this.

Both speakers did an excellent job presenting today and all were happy to have certain complicated items clarified through these speakers. Following the speakers, we had a group discussion led by Joe and Heather which focused on Human Resource Management for events and festivals.

Hope all is well in the Midwest, off to Turino tomorrow!