About XandY
Founded by two Yale scientists, XandY is an independent research and strategy firm that helps accelerate the world’s most important ideas.
We specialize in the most challenging situations where emotions are strong, habits are firm, opinions are polarized, misconceptions are rampant, and the stakes are high. In these complex issues, we help organizations locate and move the levers that create lasting change. Past clients include billion-dollar corporations, major tech startups, and global NGOs.
The Why of XandY
There are brilliant ideas and innovations emerging all around us—and many are important for society. But great ideas do not succeed simply because they are great. In fact, history is littered with valuable innovations that just didn’t catch on due to unsolved obstacles in the form of popular myths, fears, habits, biases, social norms, politics, and distractions.
Right now, many emerging innovations — in tech, health, finance, education, and politics — are at a crossroads in public perception and behavior. Even the best of them are not guaranteed to have durable, widespread success. XandY exists to help grow and spread the world’s most important new ideas and solutions.
Custom Client Projects
The research power of XandY is available for custom research projects. For past clients, these projects have included national consumer research, user experience studies, public opinion polling, behavioral interventions, RCTs, in-depth interviews with niche audience segments, and more. In any of these, XandY serves as your expert guide while collaborating with you in crafting the goals, methods, logistics, analyses, interpretation, and reporting. Clients choose XandY when elite quality and rock-solid confidence are absolute necessities.
OUR THEORY OF RESEARCH
Our fundamental first step is to fully understand the relevant people. What do they value? What motivates them? What holds them back? What does the world look like from their eyes? What do they really think about you and what you offer? XandY has world-class expertise in an arsenal of methods including surveys, interviews, focus groups, and behavioral research that can get under the hood of your unique target audience.
Our second step is to use those insights to develop and test effective strategies. Nothing can replace the certainty of scientifically testing whether your plan will actually work. Can this tactic shift opinions? Will your advertisement be persuasive? Is your spokesperson trusted? Will your re-brand evoke the intended response? How can you change the narrative? Using controlled experiments, XandY can identify precisely what effect your tactics will have, and how the effects would differ for different groups of people. These insights help you choose the right approach for the right audience.
Our third step is to guide you through the deployment of these strategies at a mass scale, and to be a trusted advisor as storms and sea-changes appear on the horizon. At XandY, we only work with clients who we truly believe in and want to succeed. Because of this, we are committed to long-term relationships in which we can contribute maximum effort as a strategic partner.
Our Public Research
Through The XandY Poll, we publish scientific-grade data on how emerging tech and new ideas are spreading in society. This national survey of U.S. adults generates new data on beliefs, sentiment, and behaviors in a variety of important issues. Please contact XandY for more information about the findings from the November 2023 iteration, as well as how people’s beliefs, sentiment, and behaviors vary across groups (e.g., demographics, users vs nonusers, audience personas).