Question

Discussion: (Minimum 1 page is required) (Please do not attempt to solve if you can not fulfill the requirement!!!!)

Major threats facing the Vitamin Shoppe, and how these might be eliminated, diminished, or deflected. Frame each threat as something present in or emerging from outside of the Vitamin Shoppe. The same technological trend, the ever-increasing popularity of social media, might also suggest a threat: Current and emerging forms of social media offer increased risk for loss of reputation via negative campaigns targeted at the company and its products, employees, suppliers, and other associates.

Answer 1

Major threats regarding vitamin shoppe are directly emerging from other big competitors. Biggest competitors are definitely one of the most important threats which small shopees has to compete with. Bigger companies have better branding strategies as well as they also have better operational structure and wide availability of online and offline presence. If a small shop has to compete with the specific big brands, small shop also has to develop better advertisement and promotion strategy for competing with the specific other competitors.
Biggest threat that is emerging from the use of social media is false advertising regarding different brands which reduces the brand identity as social media can be totally adjusted by a paying more money for the advertisements. Bigger organisations pay more to the social media companies for advertising their products which reduces the efficiency of smaller shops and increases profits of bigger brands but reduces the overall impact of the smaller brands on the specific market segment.
Negative campaigning is one of the biggest issues which is very harmful for smaller organisations are they cannot invest more money to compete with large negative campaigns. Type of approaches not only reduce the effectiveness of a smaller organisation but they also provide a negative feedback for similar brands. Product targeting can be very harmful for any organisation as it directly decreases the overall trust of the Pacific plant and reduces the product quality by a huge margin.
Reducing this kind of issues require proper identification of emerging threats as well as strong online presence by the specific organisation. Creating specific department for having online presence and mitigating the negative impact as well as reporting is an essential think that would be done for small vitamin Shoppe.