Locking and Unlocking Brand Sections

A brand is a long-lived asset. Some parts of it — your vision, your archetype, your final color palette — are decisions you want to protect once they’re settled. Markolé’s section locks are the mechanism for that protection: locked sections cannot be modified, by you, by teammates, or by AI agents connected through MCP, until they are explicitly unlocked.

1. What Can Be Locked

Locks are available across the parts of your brand where “final” matters most:

Brand DNA sections — individual narratives such as vision, mission, values, archetype, personality, tone of voice, and the other 17 narratives. You can lock them one by one.
Visual identity sections — color palettes, typography, and the dos & don’ts for visual usage.
Logos and brand imagery — locked assets can’t be regenerated or replaced until unlocked.
Presentations and reports — final brand presentations and reports can be locked once approved.

Not every part of Markolé exposes locks; you’ll see a lock affordance wherever it’s available.

2. How to Lock a Section

Open the section you want to protect — for example, a narrative card in the DNA Studio or a palette in the Visual Studio.
Click the lock icon in the section header.
The section is immediately locked. The lock icon turns active, and edit/regenerate actions on that section become disabled in the UI.

Locks take effect immediately for everyone connected to the brand. Teammates see the same locked state in real time.

3. How to Unlock a Section

Open the locked section.
Click the lock icon again. Depending on your role, you may be asked to confirm.
The section is unlocked and edits are available again.

Only users with Admin or Editor roles on the brand can lock or unlock sections.

4. How Locks Affect MCP Writes

If you’re using MCP to let external AI agents (Claude Desktop, Claude Code, custom agents) write back to your brand, locks are enforced at the protocol level:

A locked section cannot be modified by an agent. The write fails with a structured error.
The error includes a clear list of which sections are locked and guidance on how to unlock, so the agent — or the user behind it — knows exactly what to do.
Logo uploads and regenerations are also blocked if the logo or its parent visual identity is locked.

This means you can hand a Pro MCP token to an agent or an agency with confidence: whatever you’ve locked, they cannot change.

For the full picture on MCP, see Markolé MCP: Connecting AI Agents Directly to Your Brand.

5. When to Lock

After approval — when stakeholders have signed off on a narrative, palette, or asset, lock it to prevent accidental regeneration.
When handing off to an agency — lock anything you don’t want a consultant or their AI agent to touch.
When experimenting — paradoxically, lock the parts you’re not experimenting with so a generation pass doesn’t accidentally rewrite something settled.

6. When to Unlock

When intentionally revising — you’ve decided a section needs to evolve.
When granting write access to a specific section — unlock just that section before letting an agent run, then re-lock after.

Because unlocking is a deliberate action visible to all teammates, it serves as a natural collaboration signal: “we are reopening this part of the brand.”

7. Tips

Treat locks as version control for brand strategy — they don’t prevent history, but they prevent silent change.
Lock the foundation first. Vision, mission, and archetype are the slowest-changing parts of a brand and benefit most from locks.
Use locks together with MCP — they’re what makes agentic writes safe at scale.