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Flying Colors thrives by connecting on a different level

May 31, 2011

Flying Colors, a technology-centered corporate event producer, is based in Minneapolis.

Photo courtesy of www.FlyingColors.biz

For 20 years, Flying Colors, a technology-centered corporate event producer based in Minneapolis, has managed to stay on top of the changing trends of the meeting industry. The company has been through social, technological and economic transitions and has still managed to prove successful.

One of the reasons Flying Colors has thrived the past 20 years is because of the company’s approach to the meetings industry. Rather than organize and facilitate the same boring meeting for each client, the creative team at Flying Colors uses its high-tech facilities as well as its Emotioneering process, which was the brain child of president and creative director Rick Cornish.

“My experience in show business was the foundation of our approach,” said Cornish. “I’ve conducted and played behind Bob Hope, Julie Andrews, Tony Bennett and Joel Grey as well as numerous Broadway tours.I studied crowd reactions, providing a real-time lesson on how these show business legends won over their audiences night after night.”

Applying that research to the meetings industry, Flying Colors created Emotioneering, its process for creating purposeful communications that influence positive change in the attitudes of business audiences.

“Emotioneering helps us narrow our approach for each client and their target audience,” said Cornish. “It involves a study of the client organization (culture, goals, business outlook) and their target audience (how they feel today, what matters to them). This enables us to tailor creative communications to produce a specific result for our clients.”

The process has proven useful throughout the last 20 years. Flying Colors has worked with an array of clients, ranging from General Mills and the International Franchise Association,toHopeKids and theMinneapolis Animal Humane Society.

“What the clients all have in common is a geographically-dispersed field organization, like sales reps, franchisees, dealers, or distributors, that sells or delivers their product or service to their customers,” said Cornish. “We specialize in creating annual meetings that align the attitudes and thus, behaviors, of people in the field with the company’s goals, strategies and values.”

Even when a client comes to Flying Colors for help with a simple video or slideshow project, the creative team digs deeper into the company’s intrinsic emotional motivation.

“We uncover the business reason for these communications, which enables us to dig into the underlying attitudes that are driving the behaviors of their target audience,” said Cornish.

The research and studying that goes into the Emotioneering process has allowed Flying

Each approach the Flying Colors creative team takes is as unique as the client.
Photo courtesy of www.FlyingColors.biz

Colors to make some very unique experiences for its clients.

“We used video to capture the excitement of motorsports in a new way, to highlight sponsorship opportunities for a championship race team,” said Cornish. “We have staged an original musical comedy to highlight the trials and tribulations of field salespeople.”

Each approach the Flying Colors creative team takes is as unique as the client. No two emotional connections, and therefore meetings, are ever the same.

“Large and small companies have different needs, but neither is either easier or more difficult,” said Cornish.

Creating unique meeting experiences means Flying Colors must have a creative team that is equally as imaginative and unique. It takes a different kind of person to adopt the Emotioneering mindset and make it work for each client.

“Our team members have a wide range of professional experience, including film (both features and indies), theater, music, show business, design, marketing, training and technology,” said Cornish. “We look for people with both a creative background and practical experience applying their creativity to business problems.”

With the industry leaning toward social media and the ever-changing aspects of technology, planners can be more stressed and frustrated with the corporate event process. This is where Flying Colors steps in to facilitate.

“Scientists call it ‘brain freeze,’ the phenomenon of taking in too much information that actually decreases our ability to make smart decisions,” said Cornish. “For those of us who communicate regularly with these overwhelmed individuals, the key is to control, harmonize and customize the messages, regardless of the media used to communicate them.”

In this fast-paced meetings industry, The Flying Colors business model thrives on the need to make an emotional connection, which is something that many businesses have long forgotten.