| name | establish-brand |
| description | Create or update the BRAND.md the writer's room writes to — by discovering an existing brand identity in the project (voice docs, published content, site copy), by importing a brand/voice document the user maintains elsewhere, by interviewing the user, or by refreshing the current file. Covers voice, audience, tone-by-context, vocabulary, no-go topics, on/off-voice example pairs, mechanics, and SEO/channels. Invoked on its own or by /writers-room:convene when no BRAND.md is found. |
| argument-hint | [path to BRAND.md, or to an existing brand doc to import] |
establish-brand
Produce or refresh the BRAND.md that every writer's-room agent reads to stay on voice. This skill runs in the main thread because it interviews the user. It ships a fill-in template at references/BRAND.template.md (alongside this skill) — use it as the section structure for everything you write, and as the gap checklist when importing.
Step 0 — Locate, then discover
The preferred home is content/BRAND.md — next to the workspaces the room creates, so the content system is self-contained. Fall back to ./BRAND.md at the project root (honor an explicit path argument over both). Check both locations for an existing file.
If no BRAND.md exists, don't jump to the interview — scan the project for an existing brand identity first. This plugin often lands in a project that already has one, written down or implied:
Quick scan (cheap, name-based):
- Glob for brand/voice docs by name:
**/brand*, **/voice*, **/style-guide*, **/tone* (markdown, in the repo or an adjacent docs/vault directory the user mentions).
- Look for published content: existing
content/, posts/, blog/, articles/ directories — published pieces are the voice, even if nobody wrote it down.
- Look at site copy: about pages, landing pages, READMEs with audience-facing prose.
Deep exploration (when the quick scan misses but you're in a real project — don't give up after one glob):
- Identify what the project is. Read the README and the manifest (
package.json, pyproject.toml, Cargo.toml, site-framework config). The project type tells you where audience-facing prose hides.
- Look where that type keeps its voice:
- Websites/apps: page templates and components (hero copy, about-page strings),
og:description / <meta name="description"> / <title> values, onboarding and empty-state strings, i18n string files, store listings.
- Libraries/CLIs: README prose register,
docs/ pages, the manifest's description field, CHANGELOG voice, even help text and error messages.
- Monorepos: a
marketing/, www/, or landing/ package.
- Grep for prose density — long string literals and markdown paragraphs are where copy lives; config keys like
description, tagline, subtitle are cheap, high-signal targets.
- For a large repo, delegate the sweep to a read-only explore subagent and synthesize from its report — keep the main thread for the conversation with the user.
Whatever you find, present it with provenance — "here's where your voice already lives," as a list of paths and one-line samples — before deriving anything. And if you genuinely find nothing, say what you scanned so the user knows the miss is real, not lazy.
Then pick a lane:
- BRAND.md exists → refresh (Lane 1).
- Scan or exploration found brand signals → show the user what you found and offer to derive the brief from it — a named voice doc routes to import (Lane 2); prose-only signals (published pieces, site copy, README register) route to import's adapted-copy path, where you infer the voice from the found prose and the user corrects the draft (correcting beats authoring from nothing).
- Nothing found, but the user has a doc elsewhere → ask: "Do you have a brand or voice doc outside this project — a vault, a Google Doc, an old guide?" → import (Lane 2).
- No identity anywhere → interview (Lane 3).
Lane 1 — Refresh
Read the existing BRAND.md, summarize it back, and ask what's changed or feels off. Update only what they want changed; preserve the rest. If it predates the current template, offer to fill the sections it's missing (run the gap check from the import lane). Confirm the diff before writing.
Lane 2 — Import
The source is an existing doc (theirs to point at, or found by the Step 0 scan) — or, in the inferred-voice case, a body of published content you derive the voice from.
- Read it and map it against the template's sections. Report coverage honestly: which sections it already covers (often better than an interview would), and which are missing. Common gaps: SEO & channels, example pairs (a doc with only on-voice examples is missing the off-voice half), content pillars.
- Ask how to bring it in:
- Symlink —
ln -s <source> content/BRAND.md. The original stays the single source of truth; edits there flow through. Best when the doc lives in a vault or repo the user actively maintains.
- Adapted copy — write a new BRAND.md from the source, restructured to the template. Best when the source is close-but-not-quite, or the user wants room-specific additions without touching the original.
- Gap-fill the missing sections with a short interview — only what's actually missing. With a symlink, put gap-fill content in the source doc (with the user's blessing) or in a thin companion noted at the top; don't let the symlink silently hide that sections are absent.
Lane 3 — Interview
Don't dump a blank template on the user. Interview them — one focused question at a time, building on their answers — walking the template's sections:
- Brand — name, what it does, what it stands for in one line.
- Audience — primary and secondary readers; what each cares about; sophistication level.
- Voice & tone — 3–5 adjectives, then force the nuance: what does "direct" mean concretely? Rhythm, formality, humor, person (I / we / you).
- Tone shifts by context — which formats they publish (articles, launches, social) and how tone flexes per format while voice holds.
- Content pillars — the recurring topics, or an explicit decision to skip pillars.
- Vocabulary — preferred words/framings, and banned ones with the why so agents generalize.
- Things we don't write about — off-limits topics, framings, formats.
- Examples — the highest-signal ask: 1–2 short passages that sound right, and one that sounds wrong. If they can say why each works or fails, capture that commentary too — pairs with commentary anchor voice better than any adjective list.
- Article structure defaults — the default shape of a piece, and their CTA policy.
- Mechanics — spelling/style conventions, formatting norms.
- SEO & channels — slug style, meta-description voice, where pieces publish and get seeded.
Where the user is unsure, offer concrete options drawn from what they've already said rather than leaving blanks.
Write
Write (or link) the file at the chosen location using references/BRAND.template.md as the section structure. Lead with a short voice summary the agents can absorb fast. Sections the user deliberately skipped get deleted, not left as placeholders. Show the user the result and confirm it's right.
