More young peo­ple in Trinidad and To­ba­go are in­ter­est­ed in start­ing busi­ness­es, but the vast ma­jor­i­ty are un­sure how to prop­er­ly mar­ket their brands for sus­tain­able growth.

This is one short­com­ing “That Look­it Brand” (TLB) founder and CEO Krista-Lee Look­it has been work­ing to ad­dress through her na­tion­al ad­vo­ca­cy pro­grammes “A Brand For You”.

Look­it has spent the past two years push­ing a na­tion­al ad­vo­ca­cy ef­fort aimed at ad­dress­ing gaps iden­ti­fied through re­search.

She ex­plained that re­cent re­search in­di­cat­ed that about 90 per cent of young peo­ple sur­veyed want­ed to have their own busi­ness­es rather than work for some­one else. She said that shift in at­ti­tudes to­wards em­ploy­ment made it nec­es­sary to in­tro­duce young peo­ple to en­tre­pre­neur­ship and brand build­ing at an ear­li­er stage.

How­ev­er, an­oth­er trend emerged at the AB4U (A Brand For You) Teen Con­fer­ence event held in Ju­ly, which showed that many young busi­ness own­ers were falling short in mar­ket­ing their brands.

“About 42% of SMEs, they have gaps right now in brand build­ing and mar­ket­ing, and that is how I start­ed the mar­ket­ing mas­ter­class­es. They start­ed last year in 2025. They all fall un­der the purview of a brand for you, and it’s a dou­ble en­ten­dre be­cause it means help­ing your busi­ness to be­come a brand for you, mean­ing you, your de­fined cus­tomer, but al­so you as a busi­ness own­er be­cause your brand has to work for you,” said Look­it in a Zoom in­ter­view with the Busi­ness Guardian,

“Fol­low­ing from that, em­pow­er­ing the busi­ness­es and SMEs meant em­pow­er­ing the youth as well, be­cause you would ap­pre­ci­ate that the whole dy­nam­ic of the work­force is shift­ing right now, and they want to like 90 per cent of them in our re­cent re­search course we did. They don’t want to work; they want to have their own busi­ness. So the im­por­tance of them re­al­ly un­der­stand­ing what brand build­ing and en­tre­pre­neur­ship is came to the fore­front.”

Look­it said the AB4U ini­tia­tives were pas­sion projects she’s ex­e­cut­ed to sup­port the MSME and en­tre­pre­neur­ial ecosys­tem, af­ter she en­coun­tered her own chal­lenges dur­ing 15 years of ex­ec­u­tive cor­po­rate lead­er­ship.

In 2025, Look­it launched the Teen con­fer­ence as two boot­camps in North and South Trinidad, which grew in­to a full-scale con­fer­ence this year.

This year, par­tic­i­pants were able to hear en­tre­pre­neur­ship sto­ries from suc­cess­ful busi­ness own­ers from di­verse sec­tors, in­clud­ing Hema Ramkissoon, Omar Hadeed, Luke Quam­i­na, and DJ Mar­cus Williams. The event, which was al­so spon­sored by JMMB, was free to at­tend.

“They came for free. It’s not a mon­ey-mak­ing thing. That’s some­thing that re­al­ly ap­pealed to them as well. That I po­si­tion the mod­el in such a way that I want the kids to come, whether they could pay or not pay or if they’re from vul­ner­a­ble sub-sub­sets. Once this is im­por­tant to them, they could come, and they came for free for the whole day, no cost. It’s not mon­ey-mak­ing, and that is be­cause of the sup­port of the pri­vate sec­tor spon­sors as well.”

Look­it not­ed many of the par­tic­i­pants had unique ideas to start their busi­ness­es but did not have sig­nif­i­cant ideas with re­gard to mar­ket­ing.

She said, “One of the things that I’ve found is a gap that they have is they fo­cus so much on, for ex­am­ple, sup­ply chain and lo­gis­tics and all of these things that mar­ket­ing is kind of ig­nored. And that’s the rea­son I’m try­ing to re­frame the per­cep­tion of mar­ket­ing and brand build­ing. It’s still viewed as an ad­min­is­tra­tive func­tion in­stead of a strate­gic func­tion. “

She said mi­cro, small and medi­um-sized en­ter­pris­es ac­count­ed for be­tween 60 and 70 per cent of reg­is­tered com­pa­nies and were re­spon­si­ble for much of the in­no­va­tion tak­ing place in the econ­o­my, with Look­it not­ing en­tre­pre­neurs are cre­at­ing busi­ness­es in key sec­tors that dri­ve de­vel­op­ment in the coun­try, in­clud­ing agri­cul­ture.

She said de­spite that in­no­va­tion, the fail­ure to build brand aware­ness of­ten un­der­cuts the progress of their busi­ness­es.

“The teens them­selves, in par­tic­u­lar, what I try to do is re­al­ly im­press on them be­cause the gap that I see is peo­ple tell you to mar­ket, but they don’t say how to. So the prac­ti­cal ap­pli­ca­tion of that is some­thing that I think I re­al­ly would love to bring to aware­ness. How do we let peo­ple un­der­stand that dri­ving de­mand for your busi­ness is an ac­tion­able and prac­ti­cal func­tion,” Look­it said.

She ex­plained that there were sev­er­al mis­con­cep­tions about mar­ket­ing ap­proach­es which fur­ther com­pound­ed this is­sue.

She said while many may be­lieve that so­cial me­dia has made mar­ket­ing “eas­i­er”, strate­gic plan­ning and ex­e­cu­tion has to be con­sid­ered. Look­it said busi­ness­es had to build brand eq­ui­ty and de­mand while de­vel­op­ing a clear un­der­stand­ing of their tar­get cus­tomers be­fore the re­turn on mar­ket­ing in­vest­ment could be re­alised.

“Now the per­cep­tion is it’s eas­i­er, but I would like to chal­lenge that thought process a lit­tle bit in terms of it not be­ing eas­i­er. But there are so many plat­forms and tools avail­able to make mar­ket­ing eas­i­er. Doesn’t nec­es­sar­i­ly mean the re­turn on in­vest­ment is eas­i­er, be­cause ac­tu­al­ly one of the dilem­mas that is faced is re­turn on in­vest­ment, and this is whether cor­po­rate or SME, it’s not ac­tu­alised im­me­di­ate­ly. You see the re­turn on in­vest­ment for your mar­ket­ing ac­tu­al­ly lat­er on be­cause you have to build eq­ui­ty, and you have to build de­mand, and you have to un­der­stand who your tar­get au­di­ence is,” she said, adding that in some cas­es busi­ness own­ers did not want to take ex­pert ad­vice on such strate­gies.

“You don’t go in­to a meet­ing and tell a CFO about his num­bers. You don’t go and tell the HR VP about how to man­age the org charts. But every­body has an opin­ion about mar­ket­ing, “she said, “And it’s not al­ways a strate­gic opin­ion, and it’s not al­ways a prac­ti­cal ap­pli­ca­tion.”

Apart from the Teen con­fer­ence, TLB has al­so host­ed “AB4U Mar­ket­ing Mas­ter­class­es” and the “AB4U Net­work Cir­cle”, which are al­so geared to­wards build­ing SMEs in T&T with sig­nif­i­cant sup­port from pri­vate sec­tor busi­ness stake­hold­ers. The mar­ket­ing mas­ter­class­es for MSMEs, Look­it ex­plained, were con­duct­ed in part­ner­ship with the Em­bassy of Mex­i­co.

The net­work­ing cir­cle was cre­at­ed to ad­dress the lack of con­nec­tiv­i­ty with­in the sec­tor, she ex­plained.