The brand strategy toolkit: The Pareto principle

Also known as the 80/20 rule, the Pareto principle is named after French-Italian economist Vilfredo Pareto, who observed that 80% of Italy’s land was owned by 20% of its population.

You don’t need to be an economist to observe that life is unfair. But if your aim is to quantify how unfair it is, then a background in economics can come in helpful. At the turn of the 20thcentury, French-Italian economist Vilfredo Pareto observed that 80% of Italy’s land was owned by 20% of its population. Subsequent study of wealth inequality led him to believe that the same 80/20 distribution could be universally applied to any society: regardless of whether he was looking at Italian property data, Parisian rental income distribution, or Swiss tax records, he...

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