By Matthew Henry

SYDNEY: Hitachi Australia today announced a restructuring of its marketing department and two new sales team appointments as the company seeks to provide a streamlined sales and marketing team.

Hitachi’s marketing department will be expanded from four staff to seven with the addition of three product specialist roles for visual products, DVD products and appliance products.

“Since I joined Hitachi two years ago, progressively we have been ensuring that Hitachi is relevant to the consumer market and we’ve had to make several appointments in sales and make the necessary changes there. Now, with the business growing we’ve really had to start specialising,” Hitachi Australia general manager, Geoff Hannaford, told current.com.au this afternoon.

“Because we are a premium niche brand, it is important that we respond quickly to the marketplace in the categories we are strong in. We’ve got to a critical mass now with our retailers and we have found that the old structure of marketing was not responding quick enough to be honest.”

Evan Manolis, who joined Hitachi from Panasonic just over 12 months ago, has been appointed to the role of product specialist – DVD, but Hitachi has not announced appointments for the other two product specialist positions.

Former marketing assistant, Elinda Sutopo, will be replaced by a new marketing communication coordinator; commercial manager, Paul Cherry, will leave the company at the end of this month and be replaced by a new commercial analyst.

According to Hannaford, Hitachi will most likely wait until next financial year before appointing another dedicated marketing manager, following the loss of long-serving product and marketing manager, Michael Mannasz.

In changes to its sales department, Hitachi has appointed Amanda Lewis as New South Wales sales executive – specialist channel, reporting to national sales manager Michael Doyle. Lewis has eight years experience in the AV integraters sector with Total Concept and All AV.

Dan Hill will replace Lara Tibaldi as Queensland sales manager, responsible for all retail consumer product sales. Hill has 10 years experience in the consumer products sector with companies including Ingram Micro, where he was national channel sales manager, and Retravision Queensland as senior buyer – IT Communications.