I am not a subscriber to the notion that brands provide meaning in people's lives or act like religions. But what I do believe is that really successful brands are ones which help to solve people's problems.

The concept of beginning with the customer and ending at the product is not new. But when thinking about brands and market positioning, it's a good place to start. All customer needs present massive marketing opportunities - just waiting to be met by products positioned to solve them.

For instance, Coca-Cola's success is largely to do with needs of the society that spawned it: the American South in the late 19th century. The time and place was characterised by a desire for non-alcoholic refreshment; a rising interest in flavoured soda drinks; and a keenness to experiment with energising "medicinal" drinks.

Many contemporary products have set out to solve consumer problems of our time: just look at Amazon (cheap, fast books), or Swatch (cheap, fun timepieces). Clarins is attempting the same thing with its new "must have" skin recovery range. While there is little new in the products themselves, the packs are positioned as the all-in-one solution to a girl's heavy night out.

We can learn a very important lesson from products like these. To create a winning product, identify customer needs that will, over time, apply to increasing numbers of people, and position your product as solving these needs. Coca-Cola's spreading popularity demonstrates this - as does the growing international success of McDonald's.

This has implications for the product innovator as well as the marketer. For the latter, the challenge is twofold: make the brand's role clear and communicate this consistently, and then ensure that the brand remains relevant to the changes in society. In the late 1800s, Coca-Cola was not the only cocaine-infused soda-fountain drink. But its carefully-managed positioning ensured that it owned the concept of invigorating refreshment.

Similarly, Smart is not the only answer to the needs of urban transport, but its design style and marketing certainly suggests that it is. Smart's positioning goes back to basics. While a VW Golf may be about your personality, your sophisticated humour, your trophy girlfriend and your love of art, Smart solves the problem of urban transport. Since urban overcrowding is a growing problem round the world, one would expect Smart to become increasingly popular (provided of course that good marketing maintains the brand association).

The downside to the story is that as the needs of society change, a brand can lose relevance by ceasing to solve the problems. For example, Bic became a massive product success - since the biro solved a need for disposable, easy-to-use writing instruments. But in cultures where the quality of ink became more important, and writing more of a "special occasion", the success of Bic has been replaced by other upmarket brands.

Thanks to marketing, Coca-Cola has managed to stay relevant - despite huge social change and despite the removal of cocaine from the recipe.

If thinking about the needs of society is a logical place to start creating superbrands, let's take two big social issues - converging gender roles and converging work and rest time - and see where they get us. Converging gender roles might suggest more products marketed at both sexes like perfumes and magazines (already a big success story), or products like the Baby-G watch that play on gender roles. But there are many untapped opportunities for brands inspired by this issue: from helping people choose their drinks at the bar to helping people choose the bar itself.

Addressing the convergence of work and rest time seems to open up even more opportunities: be it life management, or time management; ironing services or total banking; employment management or the provision of personal assistants.

So if you want to know where the next iconic consumer brands will be, take a look at people and the world they live in. Keep your products relevant, position your brand as a solution to any of these problems and you've got something that people can't do without.

Chris Grannell is a freelance marketing consultant
email: chris@grannellmarketing.com