Katie Hafner Quotes

To study consumer behavior is to explore human nature at its most fundamental level using the modern world as its backdrop.

I've made my best personal investments when I've been a user of the product. Like Apple. The epiphany for me came when I purchased my fifth iPod and I hadn't unwrapped my fourth. It was still in the plastic case.

Companies are very, very good - better than consumers themselves - at knowing what consumers are actually craving.

Most anthropologists are doing straightforward ethnography, and should.

I love market research because you really have an idea of what your consumers are looking for.

Sometimes an ethnographic inquiry will lead to new ways to use an existing technology or will generate new technologies.

How do you know what people value? Well, you watch what they buy. How do we know what products to create? Well, it's based on what they value.

I think we have a great track record on being relevant, on identifying consumer trends, needs and wants.

Traditional market researchers are cold and calculating and scientific.

You have to understand who your customer is and her motivations and marry it to what's happening in the outside world.

Customers don't know what they want. There's plenty of good psychology research that shows that people are not able to accurately predict how they would behave in the future. So asking them, 'Would you buy my product if it had these three features?' or 'How would you react if we changed our product this way?' is a waste of time. They don't know.

When companies try to guess what consumers want, they essentially make the choice for consumers.

The world is now awash in data and we can see consumers in a lot clearer ways.

The way to do fieldwork is never to come up for air until it is all over.

I specialise in taking teams of designers, psychologists, usability experts, sociologists and ethnographers into the field. It's called 'corporate anthropology,' but personally I'm more comfortable with 'design research,' because I'm not an anthropologist by training.

We need to be in front of consumer trends and translate those trends into insights and foresights.

I view my job more almost as a field biologist or anthropologist, where I'm collecting practices. I'm collecting techniques.

If you think you know the consumer better than anyone, then you're in real trouble. So we take a close watch. You spend time in stores.

Social media provides the modern-day version of mystery shopping and walking the halls.

It's incredibly important to be - once you do have a product - acutely observational about the trends.

Betting all your funds on the belief that you know what consumers want and are willing to pay for is like jumping into a river to test its depth - you'll need a lot of luck to stay afloat. To have a truly successful product launch, the conversations with your customers must start long before you write your first line of code.

We're guided by consumer data, and it helps give us the confidence to invest where the consumer is going.

I want to invest in a functional product that people are using.

One of the weird things about being a designer is guessing what the world will want about a year in advance of when they will want it. It becomes almost a psychological test in a way - how do I feel now and how do I want to feel then.

Think about the market, think about the design, and think about who is going to design for that market. Hit the mark.