Kidpreneurs 101: Building a Brand – Basics for Young Business Stars

So you’re planning to launch a business as a kid entrepreneur. Well, you’re in great company. Many kids like you worldwide have identified their passions and directed their energies into finding business success. These kids are running clothing stores, merchandise stores, jewelry stores, and more. They’re building their brands as motivational speakers, lobbyists, and successful business minds.

If you want are also planning to do something like that, we are super excited to be here today. We aim to give you a guidebook about an extremely important aspect of a successful business: brand building.

With solid brand building, you can turn a simple business idea into a roaring entrepreneurial success.

And it all starts here.

A 10-Step Guide

Business-minded young children can follow the same principles as adult entrepreneurs but with some considerations due to their age and experience. Here’s a step-by-step guide for young business stars to launch a successful venture.

1. Identify a passion or interest

Always play to your strengths. Launching a business, though an exciting idea, can sometimes also be stressful and tiring. So, you have to find something that you genuinely love, so you can pour your energies into it and commit to it.

Young entrepreneurs in this list, for example, have started all sorts of businesses, but they always invested in what they had a natural talent and interest in. Riley Kinnane-Petersen, for example, went for a jewelry-making business while Sophia Fairweather is an innovator of unique products as well as a young economic lobbyist.

So pick what you can happily do for a long time, and play to your strengths.

2. Research

Once you have identified what you want to do, and have an idea in mind, you must learn everything you can about it. Does the idea have a place in the present market? Does it fulfill a need for a customer base?

Invest your time and effort to learn the market you want to get into, who will be your competition in the market, where will your business premises be, and what will be your product’s or service’s unique selling point.

This stage will help you identify gaps in your target market so you can devise a unique selling strategy for your product or service.

3. Define your brand

All stages of business development are important, but this is one of the top ones. Defining a brand means creating and shaping a distinctive identity for your product or service.          

You’ll have to think a lot about what makes your brand unique and different from others. Because if it is like everybody else’s, you’ll have a hard time convincing people to buy from you and not anybody else. But by unique, it doesn’t mean that it has to be something completely different from everything else.

Instead, focusing on areas where your competitors are lacking is usually a good strategy. For example, you can focus on customer services, peppering your merch with feminist slogans, or only working with sustainable clothing.

As long as you can tell people what makes you better than most competitors, you’ll have a strong market to sell to.

4. Create a distinct brand and logo

This is a fun stage where you’ll personify your brand. Meaning, that you’ll give your brand a symbol, colors, and a shape to show people what it looks, feels, and sounds like.

Creating a brand, choosing your logo colors, and building a website, are all a part of this stage.

However, logo creation is usually an expensive exercise. But online logo makers as we’ve linked just now are a pretty decent place for you to start. You’ll only need to add your brand name and slogan, and then choose a logo design from the many premade options you’ll get.

When you are choosing your brand’s colors and fonts, pick something that matches how you think of your brand. Is it fun? Sporty? Sassy? Casual?

Your brand’s visual elements — colors, shapes, fonts, etc. — must match its deeper character and personality.

5. Develop your product or service

This is where you have to roll up your sleeves and get to work. Developing a product means you need to finalize what it is, how will you make it, the raw materials you’ll use, the standards of quality you’ll follow, and what the promise of your brand will be.

If you are developing a service, you’ll have to map it out from start to finish. For example, what is the service, who will it benefit, what are you going to charge for it, what will the service hours be, and so on.

To clearly outline your plan, use presentation software to chart every stage of the journey, and identify areas where you’ll need to work on the most.

6. Set a price

As a young entrepreneur, it is your responsibility to choose a pricing point that balances a lot of parts here. First, you have to make sure the pricing sufficiently covers the production costs. Second, how much your competitors are charging for a similar product or service? And finally, what is the perceived value of your brand?

Let me give you an example here. Nike charges more for its footwear than its closest competitors. In 2017, the average price for a Nike sneaker was $80. Adidas was $10 less at $70, whereas Reebok was priced at $60.

If you look objectively, all three brands manufacture sneakers of similar quality. But Nike can charge more because it has a higher ‘perceived’ value. This can be for several reasons — such as Nike’s active participation in athletic causes — but it’s not because of any objective merit such as standard of quality or production.

So, when you are devising your pricing strategy, amplifying your brand message and highlighting its unique selling point might give you an edge if you want to set a higher price.

7. Build an online presence

Once you have created and developed your brand, you must present it online to the public. So much of our commerce is happening online. Ensuring your brand is properly presented on all mainstream social media channels will be extremely important.

These channels will serve as your digital storefront where you can display your products, take online orders, talk to your customers, and advertise to your audience directly.

Since you are a member of Gen-Z or Gen-Alpha and know more about popular social media platforms than me, I won’t mention the top brands here. But I will say that you’ll have to sit down and figure out which platform to pay attention to the most.

For example, if you are building a wellness and beauty brand (selling organic bath bombs or lip balms or something similar), you might find a huge market for it on TikTok. But if you are a young entrepreneur developing a lifestyle brand, Instagram may be more suitable.

8. Content creation

Start creating engaging and relevant content related to your brand. It must resonate with your audience and can include blog posts, videos, social media posts, and more.

Share valuable information and insights about your brand, market, your products and services, and other helpful stuff that you think your visitors would appreciate.

When you are creating content, make sure you publish it on a consistent schedule. There are tons of online social media management apps that you can use for this purpose. Buffer, Hootsuite, and SocialPilot are a few you can try.

Using these apps, you can schedule your social media content weeks in advance. So instead of going on your Instagram every 5 hours every day, you can just go once and schedule all the posts for the week. These posts can automatically go online according to the schedule you’ve set.

9. Promote your brand

What good is a brand if a huge chunk of your target market doesn’t even know that it exists?

Developing a brand is only half the story, all the rest of the struggle depends on how well you can market it. There are a few ways you can market your brand. Do it on social media by posting regular content, buying online ads, and collaborating with online influencers.

You can also do it by partnering with local businesses and arranging deals, discounts, and giveaways. Working with local charities and nonprofits is also a great way to tell your community about what you do and how you are using your commercial success as a way to give back.

Promoting your brand will require a bit of trial and error before you can arrive at a strategy that works. So be prepared for a somewhat longer journey ahead.

10. Provide excellent customer service

Nothing builds a more solid foundation for your brand than excellent customer service. If you succeed at establishing yourself as a brand that cares for its consumers and strives to provide them with a positive experience at every touch point, you win the entire thing.

So, when your customers come to you with a complaint or a query, do whatever you can to solve their issue and ensure they return happy. Make it easy for your consumers to reach out to you. Reply positively to their comments and be open to feedback. Prompt response to customer queries and a positive experience for every customer cements your brand reputation and improves your brand perception.

The Takeaway

Brand development is a process of evolution. Successful brands, big or small, continue their development as it’s fundamental to success. When new technology is introduced or new competition enters the market, continuous brand development ensures that you know how to survive and adapt.