The rise and fall of a brand

What do you need to create a successful brand? A huge advertising budget? It helps, of course, to have oodles of money to back up your story, but I don’t think it’s the key ingredient at all. If you’ve got enough passion, advertising budgets don’t matter. If you’re in love with your consumer and your product, a kind of magic happens that allows you to achieve big things with small bucks. If this sounds like wishful thinking, here’s my own story. In 1980 I launched a brand of jeans called Flying Machine literally on a shoestring budget. Its initial launch was done by kids who fell in love with the jeans and sold them to one another. They created such a rush on them that we couldn’t keep up with the demand! Then, to enter the Mumbai market, I released one ad in the Times of India (yes, just one) and used one major billboard (which I negotiated at a bargain rate over a drink with the owner one evening because it was the monsoon season). O&M made such a phenomenal ad for me that it was talked about for years after that. The credit goes to Ranjan Kapur and Elsie Nanji. It had a sassy headline “Who needs phoren?”