Andrew Mamonitis

Kaspersky Lab really understands the importance of using clever marketing strategies for brand awareness.

While the global company has been in the Australian and New Zealand markets for some time, it was relatively unknown until 2009 when Andrew Mamonitis joined as the ANZ sales director before being appointed to managing director for the region a year later.

“Although we were a very large organisation globally, we had a very small presence here,” Andrew admits. “We had a small distributor that was appointed to sell Kaspersky within the country, but we didn’t have a local office and we had no local staff. The general public awareness of the Kaspersky Lab brand simply wasn’t there. However, the good news was that we had a great product and we were well known for our technologies among the IT-savvy community. We especially had a strong reputation for our security products and services. It wasn’t such a difficult task to change consumer perception; we just needed to have some intelligent and aggressive marketing.

“My first port of call was to generate business in the B2C [business-to-consumer] space. I figured that was the way to penetrate the market and to get some brand exposure—to really let people know who Kaspersky was—because at that stage there was almost zero brand awareness. People didn’t even know how to pronounce the name.”

Within three months, Andrew had made significant progress in overcoming this challenge. He signed Kaspersky up to two of the largest retailers in Australia—Officeworks and JB Hi-Fi—and also undertook a major three-year sponsorship deal with the Melbourne Football Club. “It wasn’t easy because we had no runs on the board here in Australia and New Zealand,” he notes. “But we were able to convince them that globally we are a major player, and they saw the value in having Kaspersky in their line-up.”