Russell Winer

Russell Winer

Russell Winer is a marketing professor at New York University and a co-author of both 2017 and 2019 studies in Marketing Letters that measured how concentrated customer sales are. The first found a mean brand-level Pareto ratio of 0.73 in packaged goods. The second found 0.67 across 339 listed companies outside packaged goods.

Who they are

Winer is listed at New York University on the IDEAS/RePEc records of both papers. He is the second author of the 2019 study led by Daniel McCarthy and the third author of the 2017 study led by Baek Jung Kim with Vishal Singh. Beyond these papers, the sources used by this publication record nothing further about his 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.

McCarthy, D. M., & Winer, R. S. (2019). "The Pareto rule in marketing revisited." Marketing Letters, 30(2), 139-150. doi:10.1007/s11002-019-09490-y.

Key ideas

The principle holds in packaged goods, with a ratio near 0.73. The 2017 study used six years of Nielsen household panel data and concluded that the Pareto principle generally holds.

It overstates concentration outside packaged goods. The 2019 study found 0.67 overall, with 0.59 for subscription businesses against 0.68 for the rest.

Both studies sit above the Ehrenberg-Bass figures. Byron Sharp's How Brands Grow prints annual tables averaging about 50 per cent. The two sets of authors reach different levels, and the abstracts do not discuss each other.

See Law of the Vital Few and The Sixty Twenty Rule.

Sources

  1. Kim, B. J., Singh, V., & Winer, R. S. (2017). Marketing Letters, 28(4), 491-507. doi:10.1007/s11002-017-9442-5.
  2. McCarthy, D. M., & Winer, R. S. (2019). Marketing Letters, 30(2), 139-150. doi:10.1007/s11002-019-09490-y.