brand-md

brand.md

An open standard for brand identity files.

brand.md is a file that lives in your project root and tells AI tools how your brand looks, sounds, and behaves. Like AGENTS.md gives AI agents coding instructions, brand.md gives them brand context.

Quick example

---
name: "Acme"
tagline: "Build faster, break nothing"
version: 1
language: en
---

# Acme

## Strategy

### Overview
Acme is a deployment platform for teams that ship daily...

### Positioning
Category: Zero-downtime deployment infrastructure.
Not a CI/CD pipeline. Not a hosting provider. Not DevOps consulting...

### Personality
Archetype: The Reliable Engineer...

### Promise
Ship with confidence. Every time...

### Guardrails
If it sounds like marketing, rewrite it...

## Voice

### Identity
We are the infrastructure teams trust when downtime isn't an option...

### Tonal Rules
- Write like an engineer explaining to another engineer.
- Never use "revolutionary" or "game-changing."
- Calm confidence. Always.

| We Say | We Never Say |
|---|---|
| "Zero-downtime deploys" | "Seamless cloud solution" |

...

## Visual

### Colors
- Primary: #0F172A (deep navy) — headings, UI chrome
- Accent: #38BDF8 (sky blue) — CTAs, links, highlights
...

Structure

brand.md
├── Frontmatter (name, tagline, version, language, type?, architecture?)
├── ## Strategy
│   ├── ### Overview
│   ├── ### Positioning
│   ├── ### Personality
│   ├── ### Promise
│   └── ### Guardrails
├── ## Voice
│   ├── ### Identity
│   ├── ### Tagline & Slogans
│   ├── ### Manifesto (optional)
│   ├── ### Message Pillars
│   ├── ### Phrases
│   ├── ### Social Bios (optional)
│   └── ### Tonal Rules
└── ## Visual
    ├── ### Colors
    ├── ### Typography
    ├── ### Photography (optional)
    └── ### Style (optional)

Hierarchy

Like CLAUDE.md, brand.md supports directory-based hierarchy. A master brand in the project root cascades down to product brands in subdirectories.

company/
├── brand.md                    ← master brand (Acme Corp)
├── cloud/
│   └── brand.md                ← product brand (Acme Cloud)
└── analytics/
    └── brand.md                ← product brand (Acme Analytics)

Product brands are sparse — they only define sections where they diverge. Missing sections inherit from the parent. Guardrails always cascade down.

Four architecture types control how much a product inherits:

Architecture	Coupling	Example
branded-house	Tightest	Google → Google Maps
endorsed	Parent visible	Marriott → Courtyard by Marriott
sub-brand	Shared DNA	Apple → iPhone
independent	Loosest	P&G → Tide

See spec/brand-md.md for the full hierarchy specification.

Generate one

Install

Add the marketplace and install the plugin:

/plugin marketplace add thebrandmd/brand.md
/plugin install brand-md@brand-md

Run it

/brand-md:brand

The skill researches your market, interviews you, and generates a complete brand.md.

Or test locally

git clone https://github.com/thebrandmd/brand.md
claude --plugin-dir ./brand.md

Then run /brand-md:brand inside Claude Code.

Spec

Full specification: spec/brand-md.md

Why brand.md?

Every AI agent writing copy, generating social posts, designing pages, or creating marketing assets currently has zero brand context. You either paste brand guidelines into every prompt, or you get generic output.

brand.md fixes this. One file, one location, every tool reads it.

License

MIT

Contributors