The Art of Marketing: From Swatch to Cleantech. From Consumption to Resource Efficiency.

Today marked a special milestone for us: our first lecture for students and colleagues at the Agricultural University of Plovdiv.

Before an audience of around 50 people, the session sparked fresh, innovation-driven discussions with a new generation of socially conscious and engaged students from the Plovdiv region. This inspiring exchange reaffirmed the growing motivation within our academic community, as well as the urgent need for science to communicate effectively with industry, businesses, policymakers, and society.

The lecture explored strategic vision, unconventional thinking, and fearless marketing. It examined how branding, innovation and disruption shaped one of the most iconic global success stories — the Swatch watch — and how this mindset can be applied to cleantech and biomass resource efficiency today.

Our speaker and co-author of the book “The Dawn of Swatch (2025)”, Prof. Dr. Konstantin Theile, shared his extensive international experience. Based in Zurich, he is part of the CCBRE team and lectures at the Imperial Business School and other leading universities. Prof. Theile has served as Professor of International Marketing, Business Ethics and Entrepreneurship at the ESB Business School (University of Reutlingen). After earning his PhD in Economics at the University of St. Gallen, he worked for UBS and Hoffmann-La Roche before joining the watch industry, where he created and led Swatch’s global marketing strategy. He later founded several companies and continues to work as a business consultant.

Highlights from the session:

1. The Environments: from the Swiss watch industry to the natural environment.
2. The Concepts: change, innovation, technology, and market focus.
3. Against the Clock: perseverance, vision, external expertise and product-market fit.
4. The marketing team: building the right team, balancing global and local perspectives and trusting intuition.
5. The Strategy: reframing challenges, prioritising storytelling over surveys, and turning constraints into creative opportunities.
6. Mastering the Message: low-budget creativity, consistency and the courage to create your own opportunities.

Our lecture traced the moment when marketing began to integrate design, storytelling, and emotional connection into technical innovation, with the launch of the Swatch watch in 1983 and the Apple Macintosh in 1984. Since then, successful innovation has depended not only on function and performance, but also on the ability to inspire, connect and communicate.

Our Perspective

At CCBRE, this philosophy aligns perfectly with our mission:

• To promote change and innovation in cleantech and biomass resource efficiency.
• We transfer knowledge from science to markets and support companies in building sustainable production and market focus.
• We also foster entrepreneurship that bridges technology, creativity, and real-world impact.

As Prof. Theile noted, a new story must now be written — one that transforms clean technologies and resource efficiency into narratives that resonate with society, investors, and consumers.

We would like to thank all the participants for this inspiring first meeting. We look forward to continuing this journey of bridging the worlds of marketing, innovation, and cleantech — right here at CCBRE.

Yours sincerely,
The CCBRE Team