Atri Chatterjee is vice president of marketing at the Sunnyvale, Calif.-based security software company. He joined McAfee.com five months ago and is a veteran of Internet-based companies Netscape and Clarify, as well as Sun Microsystems.

What sets McAfee.com’s products apart from other security software is the constant connection between a user’s PC and the company’s Internet-security technology.

McAfee.com’s subscription-based service provides users with automatically updated applications that protect against hackers and the 150 to 300 new viruses that are unleashed each month. “Whenever we have a new release, within 48 hours more than 95 percent of our customers have been updated,” Chatterjee says.

A unique challenge for Chatterjee is helping users differentiate between McAfee and McAfee.com. The former (http://www.mcafee-at-home.com/) is the online subsidiary of Network Associates (Nasdaq: NETA), which maintains the McAfee name on its boxed products and controls 75 percent of the online company. When someone buys a subscription service from McAfee.com, they’re protecting every computer they use for as long as they subscribe to the service.

“You can use it on a work computer and home computer. We protect users, they could be on multiple machines but they still get our protection,” Chatterjee says. “This is the next generation of the way you should get software.”

It’s no surprise that this dot-com company uses the Internet as its primary sales and marketing tool.

“That was very attractive from a direct-marketing standpoint, because you don’t have a one-to-one sales force,” Chatterjee remarks. “We have a one-to-many situation with the Web site as the primary sales tool. So it becomes very important how you attract customers to try things out and how you retain them.” Branding, both direct and indirect, has helped the company attract 1.4 million subscribers.

Chatterjee benefits from sticking to advertising plans that have been proven to attract new customers. “I have to know how an activity is going to bring in customers. We have to be able to measure that,” he said. “The branding and marketing aspects have to coexist with revenue aspects. If they don’t, we don’t do it.” The company utilizes e-mail campaigns using psychodemographics to determine who is likely to be a McAfee.com customer. Word of mouth, especially via the Internet, is also effective.

Every virus outbreak is a marketing possibility. McAfee.com actively tries to be featured or mentioned in news stories about virus protection. ”Since every user of ours is tied into our back-end service, we have a pretty good sample size [to determine] how a virus is spreading and we make that available,” Chatterjee explains. “We don’t make any direct money, but it gives us indirect branding.”

The company avoids what Chatterjee calls “purely impression-based branding, where we take out a large ad in a national newspaper to put the McAfee name up there with nothing else. We want to get our names in front of audiences we think are relevant.”

McAfee.com is very much an Internet company, and it’s marketing is reflective of that. But its marketing tactics are a big change from the “marketing splash” concept that typified early attempts to do business on the Internet.