#1
WACKER tops the Chinese online trading charts for customers looking for silicone cartridges.
These products are offered on livestream shows and praised by skilled professionals and ambitious DIYers in internet chat rooms: silicone sealants from WACKER have become available in China on all key business-to-customer sales platforms. Consumers wanting to stock up on the green and gold cartridges with the WACKER logo no longer have to turn to specialty retailers or to their local home-improvement store – now they can order the products on the internet and have them sent straight to their door. And business is humming right along. One in every five WACKER cartridges already makes its way into customers’ hands through online channels. And that number is growing.
The key driver for this success story is a cross-functional six-person team in China. “We were pretty sure that the marketing model would work,” says George Lu, who heads the sealants business for WACKER China. “But even I was surprised by what a hit it turned out to be.” The years of work that went into the marketing concept paid off. In 2024, the team received the company’s most important research honor – the Alexander Wacker Innovation Award.
Lu, who lives and works in Shanghai, has been involved with silicone sealants ever since he joined the company ten years ago. There was one issue though that bothered him. “WACKER offers high value products, but conventional distributors often aren’t interested in actively promoting this. They care more about cost,” he says. “So I asked myself: how can we promote the value of our high performance sealants more directly and efficiently to end consumers.”
Silicone sealants are the only ready-to-use product in the portfolio of the chemical group. Once dispensed into cartridges, they can be used immediately as adhesives, for sealing joints in kitchens and bathrooms or for installation projects. As a result, no other product lends itself to B2C marketing quite as well. However, WACKER follows different regional marketing models: the company name does not appear in Europe or the Americas, for example. Customers there market the cartridges under their own brand names. Cartridges bearing the WACKER logo are available only in certain countries in the Middle East, Africa and Southeast Asia. And in China.
When Lu assumed leadership of the sealants team in 2020, the company had already had some initial B2C experience. In 2007, WACKER China offered silicone sealants under its own brand name via distributors. However, the initiative was only modestly successful. Lu responded with a new approach that focused on alkoxy silicones, an indisputable premium product. Unlike other sealant technologies, such silicones offer multiple advantages at once: as non-acidic grades, they can be used in various indoor decoration scenarios. They are also highly suitable in bathrooms and wet rooms, where reliable anti-fungi performance is requested. And in terms of consumer protection, alkoxy sealants are especially safe for the user and the environment, as they only emit alcohol during the curing process. “If you want to be successful in China, you have to offer the customer something that the others don’t,” says Lu.
In 2020, his team started marketing WACKER DA, an alkoxy sealant that is both durable and antifungal, hence the acronym “DA”. The antifungial property was also analyzed and certified by an independent testing institute – an utter novelty in China. “WACKER was the first company to put a product like that on the market. So, after a comprehensive marketing campaign, DA became a bestseller, and the WACKER brand was suddenly famous,” recalls William Wang, a technical service manager who joined the business team at the time. The consequences of the COVID pandemic also accelerated the business. Many people in China used the pandemic lockdowns as an opportunity to modernize their bathrooms. Low-odor products were in particularly high demand.
Sealants in China: fierce competition
At his office in Beijing, project team member Rula Wang provides marketing support for silicone cartridges in the northern part of the country. He has been in the business as a marketing manager for many years and knows the market like the back of his hand. With over 1,000 manufacturers, China is one of the most challenging sealants markets in the world. Intense competition and a weak construction industry had been generating downward price pressure for a long time, Wang explains. “Construction companies and craftsmen generally opt for cheap products in order to keep costs low, but that leads to defects and complaints. Unfortunately, not enough customers know that you can prevent all that by using high-quality products like our alkoxy silicones.”
But that’s changing now. The internet and its marketplaces are turning the B2C business on its head – and taking the buying habits of many customers in China with them. China is already one of the world’s most important online markets. Over one billion Chinese regularly shop online for clothing, food, cosmetics and consumer electronics – just about anything you need for private consumption. And that includes silicone cartridges.
When examining several e-commerce models, Rula Wang, supported by his colleagues from Distribution Management, Maria Mei and Qiang Cao, quickly realized that WACKER had neither the resources nor the logistics to manage the complexity of online retail by itself. So the managers decided to head in another direction instead, pursuing a variant in which distributors are responsible for the online business. All WACKER has to do is provide the cartridges and the sales and marketing expertise. “The distributors manage all of the online ordering and payment processes, they do the packaging and shipping, and they even process and handle complaints,” Cao explains. “Our role is to train the sales personnel and to provide advertising materials for online platforms.”
Both managers have spent years studying the development of the sealants business on key online retail platforms. Their findings are hardly surprising: B2C platforms like Tmall, Taobao and Jingdong hold enormous possibility for the WACKER label. “Double-digit growth rates aren’t out of the question,” Mei says. Online retail does have its own rules, however. “WACKER has a lot of experience in the B2B world and is well established there. But in the B2C business, it’s all about the brand. That makes these kinds of marketplaces fundamentally different from the platforms we’re used to dealing with,” points out Cao, who has been supporting distributors and retailers throughout China for nearly ten years.
E-commerce lite
WACKER began gathering e-commerce experience on Taobao in 2015. The platform, a Chinese eBay of sorts, has 500 million registered visitors, making it one of the most-visited websites in China. In 2018, WACKER followed up with online stores on Jingdong and Tmall, which are the two largest B2C marketplaces in China. Starting in 2022, WACKER products also became available on Suning – more or less a Chinese version of Amazon – as well as on Pinduoduo and TikTok. The latter also features its own shopping app in China. Users here can purchase products online immediately without having to switch over to an e-commerce marketplace.
The new marketing model was a bit of a hard sell at first. “Our material was good, but people didn’t know our brand well enough,” Cao recalls. Sales figures did not start to go up until distributors began incorporating more advertising and the business team decided to focus on alkoxy sealants for indoor decoration. Livestream shows, which every major e-commerce platform in China offers nowadays, proved to be particularly effective. These ongoing advertising programs exclusively pitch brand-name products, such as WACKER silicone cartridges. During the broadcast, viewers can ask questions using the live-chat feature and immediately receive answers in real time.
The investments are paying off. In internet searches, cartridges bearing the WACKER logo with an overlay of the German flag are routinely among the top hits. “For a lot of Chinese, the ‘Made in Germany’ label still serves as a seal of quality. Our products benefit from that too,” says Rula Wang. Distribution expert Qiang Cao agrees. Among online retailers, WACKER cartridges have actually gained cult status, he notes. “A lot of people even compare the WACKER brand to Apple.”
Do it yourself
Starting in 2023, the marketing team also began exploring social media opportunities. Do-it-yourself videos on platforms like Xiaohongshu were particularly interesting. In these, homeowners – even those with little in the way of handyman skills – can learn how to seal a joint perfectly and discover which silicone they need to guarantee a successful job. These kinds of product recommendations are a gold mine, which is why collaboration with do-it-yourself experts has recently begun playing a bigger and bigger role for the project team. Starting in 2023, the marketing team also began exploring social media opportunities.
That’s especially true for Sijie Xiao. The PR expert, whose role includes corporate and marketing communications and support for the WACKER Academy in Shanghai, is the first point of contact for social media inquiries. Her work currently revolves around three platforms: WeChat – for posting company and product news – TikTok and Xiahongshu, which are also used for influencer marketing. “You can’t measure the success of our work in sales numbers,” Xiao points out. “It’s more about establishing WACKER as a powerful brand and earning positive reviews that grow our brand value significantly.”
The success of the new business model in China could also be a blueprint for other regions. Qiang Cao, who is already investigating several new online options, agrees. “With our example, we would like to encourage other teams in the global WACKER network to take a close look at the possibilities the internet offers for the direct marketing of their products locally.”