Stage 2: Brand documents
Categorized uploads. Per-document annotations. Importance and authority sliders.
Stage 2 is the upload step. Skippable. If the brand has documents, this stage shortens the agent flow more than any other. Fewer questions, faster validation, higher-confidence output.
The six categories
| Category | What goes here |
|---|---|
| Brand Guidelines / Brand Book | Logo rules, color palette, typography, tone rules. The visual and verbal source of truth. |
| Brand Strategy Document(s) | Positioning, purpose, values, vision, competitive frame, benefit ladder. |
| Communications / Content Strategy | Messaging frameworks, content pillars, editorial guidelines, channel strategy. |
| Audience and Market Research | Segmentation, persona documents, competitive audits, consumer research from the last 12 months. |
| Campaign Examples and Creative | Recent campaigns, social content, ads. The brand at work, not the brand on paper. |
| Other Documents | Decks, memos, competitor teardowns, anything else with brand signal. |
The category tells the agent which lens to read the document through. A brand book read as a strategy document misses half its rules. A strategy doc read as a brand book misses the strategy.
Per-document annotation
Every uploaded document gets a free-text annotation. Examples:
Pages 12 to 18 have the most current voice guidelines. Ignore the old tagline on page 3.
Slide 8 is the final positioning. Earlier slides are exploratory.
These are our best-performing campaigns from Q4. The tone here is what we want more of.
Annotations are read alongside the document. They shift what the agent treats as canonical.
Importance and authority
Two sliders, 0 to 100, per document.
- Importance. How heavily this document should weight the agent's reasoning. A 90 brand book outranks a 30 internal memo on visual rules.
- Authority. How current and approved the document is. A 95 dated 2025-Q4 deck outranks a 50 dated 2022.
Defaults are mid-range. Adjust when the truth is not the default.
What happens after upload
Each file moves through four stages: uploading, extracting, analyzing, vectorizing. Files in any of these states block advancing. Files that finish vectorizing become available to the agent's knowledge tools.
Failed files can be retried inline. If a file fails twice, remove it and continue.