Baek Jung Kim

Baek Jung Kim

Baek Jung Kim is a marketing researcher, at New York University when the paper appeared, and the first author of a 2017 study of sales concentration in packaged goods. The paper used six years of Nielsen household panel data and reported a mean brand-level Pareto ratio of 0.73, concluding that the Pareto principle generally holds across packaged-goods categories.

Who they are

Kim is the first author of "The Pareto rule for frequently purchased packaged goods: an empirical generalization", with Vishal Singh and Russell Winer, all then at New York University, published in Marketing Letters in December 2017. Beyond this paper, the sources used by this publication record nothing further about Kim's career, and this page does not supply it.

Key papers

Kim, B. J., Singh, V., & Winer, R. S. (2017). "The Pareto rule for frequently purchased packaged goods: an empirical generalization." Marketing Letters, 28(4), 491-507. doi:10.1007/s11002-017-9442-5.

The paper used A.C. Nielsen consumer panel data covering six years of purchases by more than 100,000 households.

Key ideas

A higher figure than the Ehrenberg-Bass tables. The mean brand-level ratio was 0.73, against the averages of about 50 per cent printed in Byron Sharp's How Brands Grow. The authors concluded that the principle generally holds across a wide variety of packaged-goods categories.

What moves the ratio. Purchase frequency and purchase expenditure were positively correlated with the ratio, and niche brands tended to have higher ratios. Brand and category size, promotion variables, change-of-pace brands and market competition were negatively correlated with it.

Neither this paper's abstract nor the abstract of the 2019 working paper by Sharp and colleagues refers to the other, so the gap between the two figures is not reconciled in either. See Law of the Vital Few and The Sixty Twenty Rule.

Sources

  1. Kim, B. J., Singh, V., & Winer, R. S. (2017). "The Pareto rule for frequently purchased packaged goods: an empirical generalization." Marketing Letters, 28(4), 491-507. doi:10.1007/s11002-017-9442-5. Read from the publisher's abstract and the IDEAS/RePEc record.