In the penultimate instalment of our six-part Inside Liverpool series, Billy Hogan, Liverpool's chief commercial officer, reveals how one of English soccer’s most historic clubs is preparing for one of its busiest summers yet.

In the penultimate instalment of our six-part Inside Liverpool series, Billy Hogan, Liverpool's chief commercial officer, reveals how one of English soccer’s most historic clubs is preparing for one of its busiest summers yet.

The final whistle of the 12/13 season blew on May 19th with a 1-0 win over QPR at Anfield. With that whistle we entered the “closed season” and immediately began finalising preparations for the start of the new season on August 17th.

For the penultimate LFC blog entry I thought I’d highlight a couple of key projects that the commercial team is working on over the summer. These projects will have an impact on our overall commercial performance in 13/14 and, in truth, have been consuming time and energy for many months already.

First is our 2013 Summer Tour presented by Standard Chartered. The tour involves every commercial area of the club from partnerships, ticketing, merchandise, and media as well as other departments like legal, finance, communications, operations and foundation. The tour essentially involves every aspect of the business of football and squeezes it into a two to three week trip. At this point in the summer, tickets are on sale for all five of our tour stops, in chronological order - Jakarta, Melbourne, Bangkok, Oslo and Dublin. With less than six weeks until we depart for Jakarta, we’ve switched our focus to finalising the many details of the day-to-day operations of the tour. Literally, what will happen on an hour-by-hour basis from the moment we go wheels up from Liverpool in mid-July until we return home at the end of the month, and then on to the two European trips in early August.

"The tour essentially involves every aspect of the business of football and squeezes it into a two to three week trip."

The first issue is how are we going to travel to Asia and Australia? We have a terrific airline partner in Garuda Indonesia who will be flying the team on an LFC-branded airplane. Garuda ran an online competition inviting fans to submit designs for the official LFC airplane and win tickets for a trip to Anfield. The entire tour party will be travelling the following route on the newly painted plane: Liverpool - Jakarta - Melbourne - Bangkok – Liverpool. We’ll be moving a small army of people including the first team, coaches, physios, commercial staff, LFC media team, community coaches, mascot, etc. The logistics necessary to transport everyone and keep the group together is a full-time job. Thomas Cook Sport will help navigate the tour party through the airports, to the hotels, to training, to commercial appearances, to community events, to matches and back to the airport again in each city.

Over the course of the next several weeks leading up to LFC’s arrival in each market, our partners in each market will be executing promotional programmes focused on the tour. Our partnerships and communications teams are working closely with each partner to ensure that the promotions are effective and winners have a great experience – whatever the prize may be. Some examples include: the Garuda example above, Warrior’s LFC Tattoo promotion to win tickets to the match in Melbourne and, in Bangkok, Honda Motorcycle is running a ticket campaign offering fans the chance to win a ticket to the match on the 28th by visiting their local Honda dealership, requesting a code and texting the code to enter. Many of our tour partners are also regional marketing partners of the club and we’re looking forward to spending time with them in their local markets during the tour.

"It’s fair to say that, although we’re in the middle of the closed season, we are very much open for business at Liverpool Football Club."

So when we’re in each city, what are we doing? As I mentioned earlier, we try to accomplish a lot in a few days’ time in each city, but to give you a few specific examples, we’ll be taking some of our current and former players out to one of our new merchandise shops in Jakarta when we visit Indonesia. We’ll be hosting several community groups at a training session in Melbourne and we’ll have the entire first team attend a dinner for Standard Chartered and our other partners in Bangkok – with many other events happening in parallel. Meanwhile, as Paul and Mathew mentioned in earlier blogs, our media team will be supporting all of this activity with content on the TV Channel and our websites, including our local language web sites in Indonesia, which recently launched, and Thailand, which is set to launch on June 17 (Thailand.liverpoolfc.com).

Although the tour does take a lot of time and energy, there are many other projects ongoing over the summer. One project worth mentioning is our global merchandise expansion. Mike Cox, our director of merchandising who joined the team a few months ago, and his team have been working on a regional sales strategy which will see a roll-out of new merchandising partnerships in Indonesia, Thailand and several other markets over the course of the next four to six months. We will look to coordinate efforts to help launch the Indonesia and Thai shops with player appearances and legend appearances during the tour. These new distribution partnerships will allow us to bring our LFC products directly to our fans in those countries and give our supporters a chance to enjoy the LFC brand experience in person in addition to the ecommerce or UK based retail experience they have enjoyed to this point. Mike and his team are focused on expanding our reach from a retail perspective on a global basis in the years to come.

As I’ve mentioned previously in this space, we are focused every day on communicating more directly with our fans and bringing the club closer to our supporters. These two projects will help us do that in different ways and these efforts will have a lasting benefit to our supporters and the club.

It’s fair to say that, although we’re in the middle of the closed season, we are very much open for business at Liverpool Football Club.

The final instalment of our six-part Inside Liverpool FC series, which will be provided by Matthew Baxter, the club's chief media officer, will be published in two weeks' time.