Great marketing doesn’t aim to put a brand on a page, on a piece of packaging or on an ad; great marketing aims to put a brand in people’s heads and hearts. One of the ways it gets into people’s heads is by being different…another is to be relevant. In fact when launching or repositioning a brand, relevance and differentiation are the first two boxes that need ticking. Getting into the heart means enabling customers to really experience the brand.

For decades, marketing professionals have learned and communicated the fact that a brand’s Unique Selling Proposition is vital in a world where every brand faces fierce competition. But a USP and great communications will only get you in people’s heads for a moment.

Building differentiation gets you immediate recognition and awareness, but how do you build on this and grow salience and a long lasting emotional attachment, whilst remaining successful? If you want to stay there you need a CSP, a Consistent Selling Proposition that is experienced as well as understood. Your USP will make your brand famous – momentarily. It will add some percentage points to your brand awareness score.

But that is just the first step to creating a great brand. To create long-term brand equity, your brand needs to be consistently associated with that differentiated positioning. For your brand to cement itself as a short cut in your consumers buying decisions, you need to turn your USP into a CSP. Being consistent is just as important as being unique.

If you can’t be consistently something, you are effectively nothing. With consistency your brand values help to bring your brand to life. Without consistency, your brand values are just a set of optimistic but empty words. You need to deeply route these values into your company, into the culture and into everyone’s behaviour.

If a brand is a promise, consistency is about keeping that promise every time. We all tend to focus on making the promise rather than keeping it. Defining a brand’s vision and agreeing its values is a lot more exciting than actually checking every piece of communication and everybody’s behaviour to make sure it truly represents the brand every time.

It’s a lot easier to just write a set of guidelines for your brand and hand them out to your agencies, rather than making sure people understand and apply those guidelines. But given the importance of consistency, how can a brand be consistent? Lambie-Nairn created the O2 brand and now we look after the Guardianship of O2. That means that we see every piece of O2 communications from every agency in every market. “Focussing on differentiation: Blueness, bubbles, calmness and a brand name with the chemical symbol for oxygen – the idea to be a refreshingly different brand was the main success factor for our challenging market start in Germany.

O2 was known 2 years after the brand launch in 2002 by 98% of the German population. And this CSP in combination with our campaign propositions makes us the most efficient brand in terms of communication success.” Our Brand Guardianship isn’t about constraining behaviour; it’s encouraging the right decisions.

“Focussing on advantages of the guardianship process: One of the main success factor to reach brand consistency in a very creative and at the same time efficient way is the free-spirited character of the guardianship process: planting the main idea of the brand into the heart of every employee and agency who works with the brand, giving the creatives the freedom they need to be creative and providing a platform for all markets to share best practice, experiences and new ideas.”

Kerstin Lindermann, Head of International Branding, Strategy & Communication, O2 Germany Being the Brand Guardians also means that we are responsible for giving inductions to new people working at O2 and the agencies that create their communications, as well as holding creative sessions with agencies who are struggling with a creative brief.

So whether it’s some packaging for Asia or some direct mail in the Czech Republic, every piece of O2 work feels like a piece of O2 work. “The role that Lambie-Nairn performs for us on what we call “guardianship” is an important one. As the O2 brand expands its footprint across Europe into new markets it is invaluable to us to be able to provide guidance and advice particularly to those marketers and agencies who are new to the brand and to its intricacies.

This is not a heavy-handed process but an intuitive, collaborative way of working that brings the brand experts together with the brand’s new ambassadors”. “Although there are costs attached to maintaining a close interest in what the brand is doing in all our markets and in all our channels and in all media, this is a price wherever it appears. The O2 brand is the envy of all our competitors in terms of its single-minded clarity – both visually and tonally.”

Peter Erskine, Chairman and Chief Executive Officer, Telefonica O2 Europe Making sure the brand values come across in everything the brand says and does, makes the most of every piece of communication. When a brand is intangible then the way call centres, sales people and every member of your staff interacts with customers is the most impactful touch-point. Guardianship is not policing – the minute it is, is the moment it no longer works.

Guardianship is about providing the frameworks and parameters for through-the-line communications and ensuring that there is one central body that’s able to see the brand in all its manifestations, and in all markets at all times. It enables continuous learning and evolvement of the brand, it avoids reinventing the wheel, as solutions can be shared across markets. It helps to create benchmarks and best practice as well as building a central system for holding all assets and applications for the brand, providing the basis for cross-market knowledge sharing and encouraging the rationalisation of duplicated materials, leading to cost savings across all markets.

Going beyond the day-to-day business, O2 provides the brand experiences people love and that truly reflect the brand. This is exceptionally powerful. It includes O2’s decision to sponsor the England Rugby team and organise O2 Scrum in the Park, a special day out for rugby fans in Regent’s Park with the best of English rugby on offer. This also includes their sponsorship of The O2, Europe’s newest, state-of-the-art indoor venue for music, sport and entertainment. The O2 offers the ultimate in brand experience for everyone, instilling the brand feeling into people’s hearts and minds.

Now that is priceless.