The Pareto rule in marketing revisited: is it 80/20 or 70/20?

In a recent paper, Kim, Singh, and Winer (Marketing Letters 491–507, 2017) studied the Pareto rule across 22 different CPG categories. The authors found an average Pareto ratio (PR) of .73, meaning that 73% of sales came from the top 20% of customers. In this paper, we use a unique dataset of 339 publicly traded non-CPG companies to see whether/when the Kim et al. result holds. We have additional data on these companies, including whether they...