An excelent article from the venrable Peter Merholz on the topic of designs and companies that benefit by relinquishing control to users – adaptive path ��? how i learned to stop worrying and relinquish control.
Relinquishing control and putting the tools in place for your customers to be “creative” is the pinnacle of the customer relationship and in many ways the richest and most fulfilling customer experience. When customers contribute to an organization it is because they get some kind of benefit from it. They like being associated with your brand, they think it might improve their service (netflix), they get recognition from the community (flickr, amazon).
Enabling customer creativity or co-creation also provides powerful competitive advantage in many cases due to network effects. Netflix beat walmart because it had loyal customers that weren’t willing to switch to save a buck, and because they had probably reviewed hundreds of DVD’s and weren’t willing to give up that equity. Imagine if you had 1000 customers that had each reviewed 400 dvd’s, how much more valuable is that service? How much more loyal are those 1000 people?
