Your first brand

Everything in Sparkia hangs off a brand. Automations write in a brand's voice, the calendar plans a brand's posts, the knowledge pages hold what Sparkia knows about a brand. With no brand, there is nothing for any of it to act on.

So a newly approved organization goes straight into this wizard, and there is no skip. The only way out without finishing is signing out, and signing back in returns you to exactly where you were.

• Basics. Name, industry, website. The first two are required and both are short. The website is optional but worth giving: see the next section.
• Sub-brands. Whether this brand has smaller labels under it. Choose Just the one if you are not sure, since you can add sub-brands later.
• Ready to build. Every answer in one list with Edit links, plus two optional extras: reference files and hints for the scan.

If you give a website, Sparkia scans it the moment the brand is created and builds a first draft of the brand's profile from it: what you sell, who you talk to, how you sound. That first scan does not cost credits.

Without a website the brand is still created, and everything still works. You just start from a blank profile and have to fill it in yourself, or run a scan later once you have a site.

Both sit on the review step and both feed that first scan, which is why they are worth a minute now rather than later.

• Reference files. Drag in a brand guide, a deck, a product sheet, a photo. They are uploaded as soon as the brand exists and before the scan runs, so the scan reads them. Documents, images and video are all accepted, and anything too large is rejected with a note on the file itself rather than silently.
• Discovery hints. Four optional notes under a collapsed panel: what to prioritise on the website, what the files contain, how the social accounts differ, and anything else. Use them when the site would mislead a reader: an old page you never took down, a product line you dropped.

A sub-brand is a label under a brand rather than a brand of its own: a gift range, a B2B arm, a second storefront.

Sub-brands inherit their parent's voice and content settings. That is the point of them. If two things need genuinely different voices, they should be two brands, not a brand and a sub-brand.

Choosing Create brand does three things in order: creates the brand, uploads anything you queued, and starts the scan if you gave a website. You land on the new brand's own page and the scan continues in the background.

You do not have to wait for it. Findings arrive on the brand's discovery page when they are ready, and you review and apply them there. Nothing is written to your brand profile until you approve it.