Customer Advocacy helps build a moat of protection from competitors

Build trust with your customers over time via a community mechanism to grow an ever-widening moat of protection around your organization.

Read the following Forbes article to understand what I mean.

In part, this idea has been what every customer advocacy program I’ve been involved with has created as a byproduct of cultivating great customer advocates.

However, we often talk about customer advocacy as an effort that further’s the organization’s offensive strategy [voice-of-the-customer (VoC) sentiment helping attract and close new business, aid product improvement feedback loops, GTM messaging, and peer-to-peer insights that aid adoption] vs. a defensive one (VoC sentiment defending competitive nay sayers, or in crisis communications situations).

The article doesn’t explicitly come out and say that what it’s talking about is an organization’s community being a customer advocacy cultivation system, but that’s what it eludes to — and those approaching community well — are achieving that.