Billy Fuccillo doesn't do anything small, including sales promotions. The owner of Fuccillo Automotive Group has raised his own marketing bar with a behemoth of a promotional event: a free, six-day cruise for every customer who buys or leases a Kia from one of his Florida Kia stores during an annual late-winter sales event.
"It's a tremendous customer-loyalty builder," says Fuccillo, a former tight end at Syracuse University who projects a larger-than-life persona that dwarfs even his commanding 6-foot-4-inch, 270-pound presence. "Customers come back every two or three years to buy a new Kia because they want to go on the trip."
To illustrate the effectiveness of the annual Cruise with Huge promotion, Fuccillo recalls a customer who came in last year to trade in a 2016 Optima with only 800 miles for a 2017 Optima. "He told my used-car sales manager that he and his wife had dinner with me on the cruise," he told Automotive News. "He said they had such a good time that they wanted to go on another cruise and party with me again. Now that's not the case for everyone who takes the cruise, but it definitely keeps bringing back a lot of customers."