Success is what customers want! They want to perform well, achieve excellence, and realize the value they expect from the goods and services they purchase. To ensure customers performance, companies must design experiences with that goal in mind. The principles of vision, access, incentive, and expertise form the foundation for what we call coproduction experiences.

Through coproduction experiences, managers can ensure the conditions for customer performance are favorable. Here's an example. When Southwest Airlines implemented its e-commerce strategy – southwest.com – in the 1990’s, customers were set up for success. With regards to vision, various promotional channels communicated to customers an attractive, novel goal – book your own tickets. For access, the web site itself provided the tool and a simple interface for completing transactions. The incentive to perform was the double Rapid Reward credit, which enabled customers to earn free flights twice as fast. Finally, expertise was provided by step-by-step booking instructions available on the site. In 2005, Southwest Airlines reported that over 65% of its revenue was generated by southwest.com. The customer conditioning was so successful that Southwest was able to eliminate the Rapid Rewards incentive without negatively impacting the site’s revenue percentage.

Customers sometimes need a kick-in-the-pants to do more work. Incentives (or disincentives) can be powerful motivators to convince customers to try new things or stop bad behavior. Rewards are the typical incentive-of-choice in coproduction experiences, and they range from simple recognition to cold hard cash.

But companies are not just limited to rewards in shaping customer performance. Disincentives, in the form of punishments, can prevent certain customer behaviors that are incompatible with the coproduction experience expected by the company and other customers. Overdrawing your checking account costs you a $30.00 charge. Being late in returning a video rental costs you another day’s rental fee.