According to Nails Magazine, the manicure business is a lucrative one with $7.47 billion spent during 2012 and 2013 on nail services. Why not cross-market a fast food product with the booming business of manicures and nail services? Kentucky Fried Chicken did just that: nail polish that tastes like fried chicken.
The idea came from John Koay, who is responsible for marketing KFC to youths in Hong Kong. Koay did not want to do a typical marketing gimmick like a toy or a stuffed animal; instead he noticed his co-workers’ well-manicured hands and thought: “Wouldn’t it be great if those tasted like KFC?”
I would not have made the same leap, but I’m not a high-powered marketing genius at Ogilvy and Mather.
“It actually tastes like chicken,” Koay said. “And the smell is amazing.”
Consumers have their choice of two “flavors” of nail polish: “Hot & Spicy” or “Original Recipe”; and the colors are beige and burnt orange. The polish has 11 herbs and spices “that float around, waiting to be licked.” Good news for the health conscious, too: the polish is preservative-free.
“To use, consumers simply apply and dry like regular nail polish, and then lick – again and again and again,” the marketing company that Koay works for, Ogilvy & Mather, said in a statement.
The shelf life of the polishes are short: each bottle is one-use only and the flavor lasts for one day.
Currently the company is not sure if it will mass produce the flavored nail polish, so it may not arrive in the U.S. Is this a good thing or a bad thing? You decide. I would skip this and stick with my traditional, flavorless nail polish. Now if the nail polish were flavored like wine or chocolate, I would reconsider.
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