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.

In Ken Blanchard’s book Raving Fans, customers are encouraged to develop a vision of how they would use products. Through this vision, customers articulate the goals they have, as well as the tasks and actions they expect to perform to achieve those goals. In coproduction experiences, companies must help customers shape their goals, expectations, and plans in such a way that balances customer needs and the capabilities of the company.

But vision isn’t just about goals. It is also about the feedback customers receive as they attempt to achieve goals. In a classic experiment by Albert Bandura and Daniel Cervone, subjects experienced different combinations of goals and feedback in relation to an exercise task. Subjects who received both goal and feedback outperformed subjects who received only a goal or only feedback by 60 percent.