Effie Award 2020

The Effie Award is the best-known prize in the advertising and communications industry and is regarded as the "industry Oscar" among companies and agencies. A high-calibre jury from the GWA, the German communications agencies association, presents this significant award for successful marketing communication in ten categories.

Our WACKER product search convinces as a Smart Search Solution in the UX/UX Performance category. The positive user experience, the tangible benefit and the increased interaction of our tool surprise and delight. We're delighted to share this outstanding award with WACKER Chemie AG.

interactive tools and WACKER's product team create an efficient link between existing demand and existing supply with the intuitive, step-by-step product search. We resolve frustrating search mechanisms in this area and offer a search by required product properties under specific laboratory conditions.

Our guided search with intuitive graphical support cleverly bypasses the off-putting complexity of chemical products. Like a building-block system for search queries, we guide users step by step towards their goal with grouped suggestions. With this novel and communicative tool, we bring together different target groups with varying use cases, a broad range of industries and highly complex properties of chemical products, highly efficiently.

In a design sprint, our experienced team and WACKER's experimental product team created a prototype and tested it in our UX lab with participants from the target audience. Due to its complexity, the search wasn't fully conceived theoretically in advance, but was built, optimised and implemented agilely based on the integration of real products and their attributes.

Together with WACKER's product team, we reduced complexity while at the same time opening up parallel search options by application, product, property or brand. A guided path that leads in intuitive steps from users' needs and requirements to the right product and to the respective effective conversion effectively brings together existing demand with existing supply.

The UX is designed so that users don't feel patronised, but supported in their work. That's why we combine the ability to search specifically for independent properties and applications with inspiring use cases and a graphical interface that conveys the feeling of getting closer to your own goal quickly and easily. The multi-stage search elegantly takes users by the hand and guides them to the right product, without them feeling led.

Anyone starting their search at WACKER today with an idea of what a chemical product should be able to do finds the right product, if it exists. Anyone with concrete ideas of what a component needs to do will find it just as easily. And anyone wanting to find out what combinations of properties are feasible nowadays will finally reach their goal intuitively too.

For the individual, it's just a search in a few steps, but for WACKER it's a big step that turns interchangeable white powders into fitting problem solvers for its customers' tasks.

In 2005, Wacker Chemie AG chose us as their lead digital agency. Since then, we've continuously developed the company's digital landscape in a continuous relaunch.

WACKER – digitalising an international B2B group

Wacker Chemie AG, headquartered in Munich, is a globally operating German chemical group. The group runs 23 production sites in Europe, the Americas and Asia and sells its products in over 100 countries. Wacker Chemie has four business divisions, based on the two main raw materials ethylene and silicon. The Polysilicon division produces high-purity polysilicon for the solar market. Silicones serves markets in construction, automotive, paints and coatings, textiles and paper. Starting from ethylene, the Polymers division produces the intermediates VAM (vinyl acetate) and VAE (vinyl acetate ethylene) and mainly serves the construction industry with dispersible powders. Biosolutions focuses on biotechnologically manufactured products and also offers contract manufacturing of pharmaceutical products.

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