Eureko gets region's businesses into Berlin
This article featured in October 2015 in 'In The Bay'.
A Morecambe-based research company is helping the region’s small and medium sized enterprises branch out and reach international markets.
Eureko, which is celebrating its twelfth anniversary today, has helped SMEs discover potential customers in German-speaking markets across Europe.
The company handles all incoming German-language mail, calls and documentation, and utilises business channels and contacts across Germany to raise awareness of products.
Eureko also develop new slogans, write features magazines and oversees search engine optimisation on websites - all targeted at German-language markets.
The company’s managing director, Vivien Hacker is originally from Germany and came to the UK as part of a programme to help improve links between Britain and his home country.
Mrs Hacker created the company after working at Lancaster University for five years, teaching German language and culture and helping students to understand the country better and it was here that the idea for Eureko was formed.
Describing how she landed on the idea for Eureko, Mrs Hacker explained how working in the UK lead to the development of the business.
She said: “I knew the German mentality, I had got to know and really like the British mentality – tolerant, quirky and pragmatic – and so I founded a company that would link up business communities in my native country with business communities in the north of England. “I knew from working here for 5 years before founding the company that the British are really inventive and creative, both in their services sector as well as manufacturing things.
“What was often missing though from the equation was a knowledge of foreign languages and of a feeling for foreign ‘ways’, i.e. different customs and traditions. My company would provide exactly those kinds of services.”
Mrs Hacker has also joined the board of directors at Lancaster District Chamber of Commerce and will help the Chamber’s members reach out into new markets.
The managing director said: “My brief is to not only support the Chamber’s work on behalf of the region, but to encourage us here in the Lancaster and Morecambe District to think internationally, to think exports.
“So to kick start this internationalisation process, we’re establishing contacts in the EU with our opposite numbers, the Chambers of Commerce in countries like Germany and Poland, starting with our twinned towns there.”
After 12 years in business, Eureko has been developing relationships across The Bay and for the past decade it has worked with Carnforth-based manufacturing company, Checkpoint, which is responsible for millions of international exports each year.
“A few years ago I helped Checkpoint win an order from MAN for two million pieces. With 20 per cent of all the lorries on British roads made by this German giant, it’s an amazing achievement to supply them directly in Munich.
“Lancashire knows how to do it - its businesses have the products, and it just requires a bit more self-belief to go out into Europe’s premier market and to sell to them on their own ground and crucially in their own language.”
Posted: 18th November 2015
at the right trade exhibition can bring your business to the front of potential customers’ minds - and keep it there. Each one of the thriving, sector-specific trade fairs in Germany is unique. It provides a real world opportunity for your business to break through the noise.
Of course, all these buzzwords refer to real things that are happening in today’s world and have to be acknowledged and welcomed by all of us. We’re all dependent on these dynamic developments, at the very latest when we go into a hospital for an investigation or a procedure, where technology plays an ever more vital rôle. But technology alone is not the solution.
Are you looking to maintain access to markets in Germany?
ecially over the past ten years when the global financial crash severely destabilised individual national economies as well as international economic systems. The United States and the United Kingdom have become fierce critics of both the currency union and the political structures of a unified Europe, regularly predicting or possibly even wishing for the collapse of both.
Before, during and after Brexit, the largest, nearest, most important single market for your products or services could well be Germany.
Trade fairs are being held every year in cities across Europe. They are ideal events for anyone involved in international trade.
In German they call it “Lokalpatriotismus”. Literally translated that’s local patriotism. In other words, the term expresses how strongly we feel rooted in our own area and how passionately we want the best for the place where we live...
What then followed had little or nothing to do with the politics or economics of countries, let alone any grand ideologies. But rather a daily goal might be loosely planned - a town, a region, a youth hostel. Whether I ever made it to any particular destination
! And Cheers!
That view is certainly shared by Daniela Flint, Senior Lecturer in Sociology, Human Growth and Development at Lancaster and Morecambe College. She has also taught German for over 25 years in the region. She is convinced that knowing and using other languages “helps prevent our segregation and isolation from other people, as well as widening our horizons and helping us connect with people on a different level.” She’s also seen how “communicating with others, playing with new and unfamiliar words (and making mistakes!)” provides fun and enjoyment for people well into their eighties.
OK, you probably understand what this sign is trying to say (although you are most likely wondering what on earth questions of time have to do with rubbish). But what this sign shows us is that not everyone is as good at English as we, or they themselves, think. Someone somewhere is so confident in their poor English that they laminated it. This wasn't a first draft. This was the finished product. And OK, maybe this sign isn’t important in the grand scheme of things and perhaps the most harm it will do is make a British woman spend her time writing a blog about it... maybe you're right. 
