Name – ApoorvaYadav

Specialization – Public Relations

Lifestyle Brand – Flying Machine

Flying Machine is an Indian jeans brand owned by Arvind mills which also manages well-known brands like Arrow, Excalibur, New Port, Ruf N Tuf and Mega Mart.

Established in – 1980

Brand Image – Youth Oriented, Tongue-in-cheek lifestyle brand, Cult brand in the 90`s in India, PremiumQuality, International Design Sense& Leader in Innovation and technology.

Target Audience – 19 to 40 yrs. of ageCollege students &Young Professionals Upmarket Youth with High purchasing Power

Adventures and Well-travelledStyle Conscious

Some Leading innovations by FM in India - Temperature Regulation Jeans- Stain free Jeans - Zero-odor jeans- Bi-Stretch Jeans

Flying Machine was a cult brand in the late 90`s but with the advent of foreign players in the market it lost its brand recognition in the masses. It was re-launched in 2007with an Italian designer and since then it has been constantly coming up with new ad campaigns to woo the young target segment.

Ad Campaign of 2007

Brand Endorser – Abhishek Bachhan was chosen in all Ad and communication campaign as he was considered to be youthful, energetic,

well established and fun loving celebrity at that point of time.

This campaign was a good start by the brand to hit the right premium target segment who were very individualistic in style and want to stand out in the crowd. However the best was yet to come…When they launched a new ad campaign series starring cricketer Virat Kohli – the heartthrob of nation`s youth who has been part of many youth based brands including AXE & Fastrack`s “Move ON” campaign.

Ad Campaign June 2011

This campaign has been the most successful campaign by the brand till date which got a lot of eyeballs catching. Indeed the communication plan was also integrated with social media platforms like Facebook, Youtube&Twitter. The fan page of FM brand shot from some few hundreds to 1,045,660 which clearly show its recognition among the youth.

The brand aimed to build a “sexy” and trendy fashion label in its appeal to its target audience.

FM Icons - Apart from Ads FM also brought up normal college going students and young

employees to have a voice of their own by making them “FM Icons” to raise the popularity of their brand.

- the FM ICONS

After the huge success of this Ad series the brand planned to take up a bold step by its new media campaign in September 2011.

Ad Campaign September 2011

In the same year Flying Machine came up with its new and bold campaign “What an Ass!” which was supposed to highlight the feature of FM jeans having a perfect fit for every body type. Though this turned out to be a very controversial ad and many women rights NGO`s opposed it saying that it project women as mere sexual object. The current brand ambassador of FM Ankit Fadia says "This is modern India and women dress up the way they want to," adding that this advertisement is not at all vulgar when compared with the kind of advertisements aired on TV and what appears in movies. Well nothing has stopped the brand from gaining popularity among the youth but it has to do a lot of PR to uplift its recall value in masses. My opinion on this current ad is that it might be done purposefully to get media attention as a rebel brand.However now the brand has come back to its previous ads where it promoted Virat Kohli as its brand person.

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