When you think of Apple products, what comes to your mind?

When you think of McDonalds, what stands out for you?

And when it comes to shopping on Amazon, what feelings does it evoke?

In a landmark study in the 1990s, Michael Treacy and Fred Wiersema revealed that market leadership of a product or offering comes from one special offering or value discipline that is a standout characteristic over all the others.

No offering is perfect in all ways.  And businesses must also not seek to achieve this. Instead,they must focus on mastering one of three "value disciplines"  , say business strategists Michael Treacy and Fred Wiersema.

According to them, value comes from one of these three elements – Operational efficiency, Customer Intimacy and Product Leadership and successful companies follow this and don't  attempt to be everything to everyone.

Their proposition stated that successful businesses needed to maintain a threshold or acceptable level of performance across all three dimensions. But in order to become a market leader, they needed to choose one of the three to highlight.

In their book The Discipline of Market Leaders: Choose Your Customers, Narrow Your Focus, Dominate Your Market , Michael Treacy and Fred Wiersema elaborate on their framework for creating product value.

They call it Value Discipline; and this has three dimensions - Product Leadership, Operational Efficiency, and Customer Intimacy, from which emerge product value, operating excellence, and customer focus.