Brand Worlds  ·  v0.1 prototype
No project
A working environment for parallel brand worlds

Build three
worlds at once.
Decide later.

A workspace for strategists building parallel brand directions — archetype, expression, activation, in loops, with co-pilots and a pressure-tester. This prototype covers loop 1: foundation, three worlds, the archetype co-pilot.

"Three to four worlds in parallel. Each one earns the right to exist or doesn't. The system makes the difference visible."

Loop 01 / Strategic foundation

The brand before its expression.

Everything three worlds will share. Fill in what you have; you can refine before locking.

Project setup
Working with research?
Paste synthesis from external work and attach it to specific fields as evidence. See the input contract.
Who is this for? Demographics, behaviors, attitudes.
The tension this brand resolves. Ideally a single quote or sentence.
What the brand stands for, against whom, and why it matters. Use the co-pilot for a structured pyramid.
Two-sentence distillation. The thought a person could repeat.
SKUs or lines the world must flex across.
Where the brand needs to stretch in three years.
Regulatory, trademark, accessibility, channels.
Who this brand positions against. Direct, indirect, status quo, adjacent, aspirational.
How this brand speaks — attributes, principles, do/don't pairs.
Naming territories, candidate volumes, shortlist with verification notes.
Composite document of everything committed. Use as a pre-brainstorm grounding artifact, share with collaborators, or print for review.
First-party consumer research that grounds this brand's strategy. Paste transcripts, summaries, key quotes, or describe what you know. Placeholder for future research artifact system.
Saved automatically. Lock to lock the foundation; worlds will reference it.
Project

Untitled

Strategic foundation

Project-level instruments shared across all three worlds. Build them in any order — later instruments may require earlier ones.

Three worlds in parallel

Each world resolves the consumer insight in its own way. Run the archetype co-pilot on any world to begin.

Archetype co-pilot

Phase 01 / Ground the brand
Standalone tool / Competitive set assistant

A quick brief, then we begin.

The co-pilot needs a minimum context to be useful. Tell it about the brand; the conversation does the rest. Nothing here saves to your project.

Standalone
Real or working name.
What space does it play in?
Who it's for. A sentence is fine.
The functional offer. What it does, briefly.
Anyone you'd already name. The co-pilot will go further.
You'll be able to copy or export the result. No project gets created.

Competitive set assistant

Phase 01 / Ground the brand
Competitive set
Positioning tool — prerequisite required

First, the
competitive set.

Positioning is triangulation, and the triangle's third point is who you're positioning against. The positioning tool requires a structured competitive set as input — it grounds the work, surfaces the jobs-to-be-done, and gives the pyramid's Frame of Reference and Point of Difference real substance.

What's missing

No competitive set has been built for this project yet.

When the competitive set tool finishes, you'll be returned here to continue.

Standalone tool / Positioning assistant

A quick brief, then we begin.

The positioning co-pilot needs context plus a competitive set. Provide both; the conversation does the rest. Nothing here saves to your project.

Standalone
Who it's for.
The tension this brand resolves.
What the brand does and why it matters.
Required. Paste a structured competitive set, or build one first using the competitive set assistant.
A complete positioning takes 45-60 minutes of focused conversation.

Positioning assistant

Phase 01 / Ground the brand
Positioning pyramid

Jobs-to-be-done analysis
What the consumer is hiring for

Surfaced from the competitive set — particularly the status quo and indirect entries. These are jobs the consumer is already hiring some product or behavior to do today. The positioning pyramid's functional benefits are this brand's case to be hired for these jobs.

Inferred from competitive set; consumer qualitative research would refine and confirm.
Standalone tool / Archetype assistant

A quick brief, then we begin.

The archetype co-pilot needs minimum context to be useful. Provide what you have; the conversation surfaces the rest. Nothing here saves to your project.

Standalone
What the brand does and why it matters. A sentence or two.
The tension this brand resolves. A sentence or quote.
Who it's for.
Brands in this territory you'd want to be adjacent to — or distinct from.
An archetype session typically takes 20–30 minutes.
Archetype direction · Standalone result

01 / Archetype pair

02 / Manifesto seed

How this world feels

A short manifesto seed capturing the world this archetype pair creates.
03 / Case for & against

Why this pair, what it isn't

Case for
What this is not
04 / Confidence & risks
Confidence
Risks to watch
05 / Considered & rejected
Other pairs the co-pilot proposed or you discussed, and why they weren't chosen.
Standalone result. Use Copy or Export to keep it — or load it into a future project later.
Voice direction — prerequisites required

First, archetype
and positioning.

Voice is downstream of archetype and positioning — it's the verbal expression of both. Without them committed, voice work is unmoored. The voice direction tool requires both as input.

What's missing

Once prerequisites are committed, return here to continue.

Standalone tool / Voice direction

A quick brief, then we begin.

Voice direction is the lightweight, foundational pass on how a brand speaks — attributes, principles, and do/don't pairs. A richer verbal identity system comes later as its own engagement.

Standalone
The brand's archetype pair, named.
A summary of where the brand sits. Paste the pyramid as text, or describe in your own words.
Helpful for grounding the voice in who's being spoken to.
Voice direction is a 20–30 minute session producing a one-page deliverable.

Voice direction assistant

Phase 01 / Ground the brand
Voice direction

01 / Voice attributes

How this brand sounds

Six words that describe the texture of the voice. Each one earns its place.
02 / Voice principles

How this brand speaks

A few principles that distinguish this brand's way of speaking. Use them to evaluate any piece of copy.
03 / Do and don't

In practice

Six pairs to guide writers. The left side is the move; the right is what to avoid.
Naming tool — prerequisites required

Strategy first,
then names.

Naming without strategy produces names that sound nice and mean nothing. The naming tool requires archetype and positioning as input; voice direction is strongly recommended. The territories the co-pilot proposes are direct extensions of the brand's strategic foundation — without that foundation, the territories are arbitrary.

What's missing

Once prerequisites are committed, return here to continue.

Standalone tool / Naming assistant

A quick brief, then we begin.

Naming work needs strategic context plus a tactical brief. Required fields ground the work in strategy; optional brief fields sharpen the output. Trademark and domain verification happen externally.

Standalone
What we're naming, in working terms.
The brand's archetype pair.
Paste the pyramid as text, or summarize.
Attributes and principles. Tightens the naming territories.

Each field below sharpens the co-pilot's territory framing and pressure-testing. Provide the ones that matter for your engagement; skip the rest.

One sentence: "We need a name for [what it is] that helps [who] understand [why it matters] while expressing [brand personality]." Or have the co-pilot propose one for you to refine.
3–5 adjectives capturing how the name itself should land. Narrower than voice direction.
The audience whose comprehension is critical.
The audience whose trust is critical, even if comprehension comes over time.
How this name fits within the larger brand system.
Where the name must work.
Length, pronunciation, openness to invented words, foreign-language inspiration. Anything that constrains form.
.com requirements, global trademark needs, regulated terms to avoid.
The dimensions you'll evaluate finalists against. Defaults shown; check the ones that matter for this engagement.
How many names through preliminary search vs. rigorous registration. Affects how aggressively the co-pilot narrows.

These inputs shape the creative gravity field the name lives within. Especially valuable for collaborative naming sessions — they let participants self-correct rather than relying on a strategist to police every contribution. Fill in the ones your engagement deserves.

3–5 descriptors of the brand's center of intellectual and emotional weight. Not what it claims; what it pulls toward.
Polarities the name must hold. Names that fully optimize one pole at the expense of the other are wrong.
Predictions about what form the right answer is likely to take. Not rules — inferences from strategy.
Who would reject this brand, and which rejections are acceptable vs. unacceptable. The strategic spine.
3–5 stance descriptors capturing the outcome state of the name. Different from "feel-like" adjectives — these are how the name behaves, not how it sounds.
A complete naming session typically takes 60–90 minutes.

Naming assistant

Phase 01 / Ground the brand
Naming shortlist

01 / Recommendation rationale

Why this name

02 / Shortlist

Finalists considered

The 3–5 names that survived to phase 4. Each has been pressure-tested against strategy, sound, and obvious risks.
03 / Verification status

Verified and unverified

The co-pilot's honest accounting of what was and was not checked. The unverified column is the brief to legal.
Verified by co-pilot
Requires external verification
04 / Territories explored

Territory framing

The naming territories proposed and pursued. Useful for legal/stakeholder audit — the shortlist is defensible against the rejected territories too.
Architecture · Input contract

Foundation input contract

The workspace is the synthesis hub in a hub-and-spoke architecture. Standalone tools — research synthesis, JTBD validation, social listening analysis, competitive scanning — produce structured outputs that the workspace accepts as inputs to strategic foundation work. This page defines the shape those outputs take.

01

The shape of a foundation input

Every foundation field in the workspace can carry three things:

  • Content — the actual text or structured data (consumer target paragraph, brand idea sentence, competitive set object, positioning pyramid, etc.).
  • State — one of hypothesis, partial, validated. Reflects what evidence has populated this field.
  • Evidence — an array of attribution entries naming what produced this content.

A field with hypothesis state is supported by pre-validation evidence (competitive scan, social listening, strategist inference). A partial field has mixed evidence — some validating, some not. A validated field has been confirmed by validating evidence (qualitative interviews, quant validation, stakeholder confirmation). Fields without an entry default to validated — the legacy assumption that committed content is trusted.

02

Evidence attribution shape

Each evidence entry has the following structure:

{
  "source_type": "qual_interview" | "qual_video_diary" | "quant_validation"
               | "stakeholder_interview" | "competitive_analysis"
               | "social_listening" | "research_synthesis"
               | "strategist_inference",
  "source_label": "Short human-readable identifier",
  "note": "Optional free text expanding on the evidence",
  "confidence_value": 67,         // optional, percentage for quant validation
  "added_at": "2026-05-15T14:30:00Z"
}

source_type determines the evidence's role in state computation. Pre-validation sources (competitive_analysis, social_listening, strategist_inference) support hypothesis state. Validating sources (qual_interview, qual_video_diary, quant_validation, stakeholder_interview, research_synthesis) support partial or validated state depending on volume and convergence.

03

The state model

Hypothesis
Populated from pre-validation evidence only. Strategist's current best guess based on competitive analysis, social listening, or inference. Awaits validating evidence.
Partial validation
Some validating evidence has landed but coverage is incomplete or signals are mixed. Strategist's judgment leans toward acceptance but the field is not yet defensible alone.
Validated
Confirmed by validating evidence with sufficient volume and convergence. Defensible in stakeholder review. The legacy default for content committed before the contract existed.
04

Producing inputs the workspace accepts

Any tool that wants to feed the workspace's foundation produces output in the following form, keyed by foundation field name:

{
  "consumer_target": {
    "content": "Wellness-curious adults, 28-42, urban...",
    "state": "hypothesis",
    "evidence": [
      {
        "source_type": "social_listening",
        "source_label": "Cluster: 'tired of performing wellness'",
        "note": "47 mentions across 8 communities, sentiment +0.6",
        "confidence_value": null,
        "added_at": "2026-05-12T10:15:00Z"
      }
    ]
  },
  "consumer_insight": {
    "content": "I want energy without the crash...",
    "state": "partial",
    "evidence": [
      { "source_type": "qual_interview", "source_label": "Interview 03, Maria, 34, Brooklyn", "note": "Direct quote", "added_at": "2026-05-13T..." },
      { "source_type": "qual_interview", "source_label": "Interview 07, Daniel, 38, Oakland", "note": "Paraphrased; same tension", "added_at": "2026-05-13T..." }
    ]
  }
}

Valid foundation field names: consumer_target, consumer_insight, positioning, brand_idea, portfolio_scope, growth_horizon, constraints, competitive_set_raw, research_inputs. Structured artifacts (competitive_set, positioning_pyramid, voice_direction, naming) have their own internal schemas — see the co-pilot outputs for those.

05

Design principles

Tolerant. The workspace accepts what it recognizes from an input and ignores fields it doesn't. Extra fields don't break the import. Missing optional fields are filled with defaults.

Attributed. Any field populated from outside the workspace carries evidence attribution. The strategist can always trace a claim back to what supported it.

Promotable. Fields are not locked at hypothesis state. As validating evidence arrives, the strategist promotes them — either manually (through the workspace UI) or via further imports that add validating evidence.

Honest. The state of every field is visible in the project brief and other shareable artifacts. Stakeholders see what's hypothesis and what's validated — they're invited to pressure-test the hypotheses rather than approve a falsely polished foundation.

Manifesto seed

Consumer resolution

How this world resolves the project's consumer insight. The thing that makes this world genuinely different from its siblings.

Case for this pair

What this pair is not

Risks to watch

Loop 01 strategic layer complete. Loop 02 (expressive direction) is not yet built in this prototype.