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 are product or service companies, whether they sell to customers on a subscription or non-subscription basis, financial and industry information, and summaries of customer purchase behavior. We find that the overall average PR is .67 with product companies having a ratio of .67, and service companies .66. We find that non-subscription businesses have a PR of .68, substantially higher than that of subscription businesses at .59. We estimate the correlates of PR by industry and other factors. Preliminary results show much higher PRs for profits than sales.