Workplace reviews and discussion: 日商優橋股份有限公司

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1. Salary figures on job banks should only be used as a reference.

2. Claims to have a low turnover rate, yet is always recruiting interns for positions that can never be fully staffed. Many people idolize Japanese companies and, after joining, worry about both their next job and not being able to find a successor, so they choose not to speak up. The Japanese-company name carries appeal.

3. Ranks among the top advertisers listed by the Department of Health—why is that? It has also been repeatedly fined, with those amounts adding up. My previous company would rather earn less than exaggerate and had the highest credibility, so its business model and philosophy...

4. Proudly developed a subscription-purchase (automatic payment) system; this system is well known in Google reviews and the industry.

5. Claims to be a startup with very young employees, instilling people who have not yet developed independent thinking with the idea that it represents Japan’s latest and greatest concepts.

6. Some people have distorted ideas, believing that Japanese models are the best and looking down on Taiwan as old-fashioned and inferior. Yet the finished products’ concepts and visual style resemble those of mass retailers and are down-to-earth, while they consider themselves to have a Japanese flair.

7. There are many specialist positions in marketing, planning, advertising, design, copywriting, web design, and so on. They instill the “Ubridge-style” integrated media advertising approach, produce LP materials, create numerous farmed word-of-mouth websites claimed to be official sites, prepare posts for KOLs, etc. It is like networking a factory assembly line: producing largely similar content every day and checking traffic figures, without requiring independent thinking or professional skills.

8. When asked about the target audience for advertisements, the supervisor froze for 20 seconds before weakly replying, “As long as they’re women, they’re the audience...” Knowing the basic concepts of marketing and understanding the company’s media advertising model is enough.

9. Claims to be an official distributor, but the information on the Taiwanese and Japanese official websites is inconsistent. The website does not introduce the distributed brands or products and does not build the brands; it only runs advertisements and sells products based on sales performance. When asked why, some supervisors were evasive, some did not understand either, and others explained that, because they represent many competing products, they were worried about offending different Japanese companies. My previous company was also an official distributor for brands from different Japanese companies. We were asked by the Japanese side about our business policies, and some of the BN and copywriting I handled required approval from Japan. Japanese companies care greatly about their brands’ image in Taiwan. Companies compete with one another, while being very polite to their Taiwanese distributors; I have never experienced worrying about offending different Japanese companies.

10. The world is a big place. So-called latest concepts, Japanese-company culture, marketing, advertising, and so on can be researched on Google or in books, or by asking people who have lived in Japan. Ask more questions, gather more information, and make a careful decision after learning more.