Unlocking Canderel’s Brand DNA: Establishing a New Global Emotional Positioning
QUAL360 APAC, Singapore — with Sandrine Ambrosi, Canderel Brand Manager
How do you uncover the emotional truth of an iconic global brand—and turn it into a positioning powerful enough to guide everything the brand does?
At QUAL360 APAC in Singapore, Dr. Constantinos Pantidos, Founder of BRAND AVIATORS®, and Sandrine Ambrosi, Brand Manager of Canderel, presented the journey of decoding Canderel's Brand DNA and establishing a new global emotional positioning.
As part of Whole Earth Brands, a global leader in sweeteners, Canderel had built leadership across multiple markets. But after decades of evolution across countries and cultures, the challenge was deeper than finding another proposition or communication claim. The brand needed to rediscover the emotional truth capable of unifying its global expression while providing direction for its future.
The presentation introduced a biologically grounded approach to solving this challenge. Using THE WHEEL OF MOTIVES®, the process began by independently decoding two systems: the emotional DNA of the brand and the deeper motivational dynamics of the sweetener category. Their intersection revealed a territory that could be both authentic to Canderel and relevant to the fundamental human motivations shaping category choice.
This is where emotion becomes strategic. Rather than deciding that a brand should simply feel a certain way, the deeper motive becomes the basis for positioning—defining what the brand can distinctively own and providing a compass for the decisions that follow.
But a positioning only becomes real when people can experience it.
The methodology therefore moves downstream from emotional territory into execution. The same motivational meaning can guide communication, concepts, product, flavor, texture, color, form, sound, packaging and story. The ambition is not merely for Canderel to signal an emotion, but to perform that emotion consistently through everything the consumer encounters.
This creates something broader than a positioning statement: an On-Brand / Off-Brand compass capable of helping different teams, markets and partners determine whether what they create reinforces—or weakens—the same underlying emotional DNA.
The presentation also explored why this structured human layer becomes increasingly important in a world dominated by AI, data analytics and machine learning. Technology can process extraordinary amounts of information and generate endless possibilities, but data alone does not provide a model of what humans fundamentally desire. By structuring the biological roots of emotion and connecting them with strategy and execution, THE WHEEL OF MOTIVES® provides a human framework that technology can work with.
Because we evolved to want before we think.
The Canderel case demonstrates the complete journey from understanding emotion to operationalizing it:
Decode the brand. Decode the category. Discover the emotional territory where they uniquely meet. Turn that territory into positioning. Then make the positioning tangible across everything the brand says, makes and does.
Biology is the blueprint. Experience is the proof.
Read the pdf presentation here: