By Emma Pierce, Marketing Manager
Joining Reading Football Club's commercial team was an opportunity which was just too good to pass up. For the past 20 years I've been a Reading supporter, and I've worked in marketing in various roles for the last 15 years.

So for me, this role combines my career in marketing with something I absolutely love. For the past four or five years I have been thinking that if I'd worked here I'd love to do this and that - well now is my chance.

I'd like to think that I am in touch with what a Reading fan would be looking for in a matchday experience. And I've got plenty of friends who are fans who are saying 'now you're in there, get this sorted, and we want this and we want that'. And there are a few who've been in touch since I got this job that I previously hadn't heard from for a while!

Since joining a few months ago I've found it's a great place to work where there is a big opportunity to do marketing in a different way.

The commercial department is responsible for five main revenue streams - ticketing, sponsorship, advertising, merchandising and hospitality. And the opportunity for us is to really put our customers, whether that be fans, corporate customers or sponsors, at the heart of what we do.

I hope in the longer term that fans will notice that we'll be meeting their needs better. I'm looking to implement a more robust programme of customer research. We need to know what our customers really think of Reading Football Club, we need to know what they want and make sure we are listening to their views. Then it will be my job to say 'OK, this is what the fans are asking for - how can we bring that to life.'

I think we also realise that we need to develop an ongoing programme of communication with fans - Customer Relationship Management, to use the marketing term. We have a great website which is updated frequently, but we need to proactively talk more directly to our fans about things we're doing and offers which might be of interest to them.

An example would be with season ticket holders. We write to season ticket holders twice around season ticket renewal time. But then we don't tend to have much proactive contact throughout the year. That's something we definitely want to change - and start to have more regular communication where we can build more of a dialogue and make fans feel closer to the club. Ultimately we want the fans to feel that they are rewarded for their loyalty to the club.

One of the challenges that we all face at Reading Football Club is the need to grow the operation alongside the success of the club. Suddenly we're filling the stadium on a regular basis and have a bigger profile compared with the one we had in the Football League. We have a brand that is really well respected with values about being trustworthy, open and friendly.

That's a brilliant thing to have as a marketing tool. So it's a great platform to build on, and now we need to start behaving like a bigger brand. We were a little friendly club at Elm Park, but have now moved to be a bigger club at Madejski Stadium. We have ambitions to be even bigger, and so from a commercial point of view we need to make that extra step up, whilst still retaining our brand values and our friendly approach.

It's a busy time of year for many commercial areas of the business. This week we launched a half-price offer for all Reading replica kit and training wear in the megastore and online, and we are developing a programme of promotional events for the merchandise business, starting with the beginning of the 2008/9 season.

As far as ticketing goes, we're extremely lucky to be selling the stadium out most weeks now. But there's always marketing which needs to be done on a week to week basis to make sure people know what we have available each week.

As I'm sure everyone is aware, we have other seats to fill other than the 18,000 season tickets. So we've done a number of initiatives lately to try and entice new supporters here. We recently did one which offered a free ticket for the Fulham game if you bought for Manchester City, Birmingham City and Blackburn. That proved a success, so we're hoping to build on that in the future.

We have a new offer for season ticket holders which is bring a friend for half price for the Fulham game. What we aim to do with the ticket promotions is never make the offers to fill any remaining seats better than the offer we have already made to season ticket holders. We know that season ticket holders are our core supporters, and so we wanted to make sure they don't feel left out when it comes to offers. We wanted to do something specific for them, and this is hopefully the start of us being more proactive to them and rewarding them for their loyalty.

When it comes to hospitality, we have upped our capacity from last year, with a whole extra room to sell. For the big games like Manchester United and Arsenal it isn't a problem, they will always sell out. But for some of the smaller teams, we don't automatically sell them straight away, so we've been proactive with offers for those games. That's been reasonably successful and we've had a good response.

For next season we're starting to think about what hospitality we offer and whether it's right for our customers. That's where we come back to the research and making sure we're offering what our customers really want.