The Challenge

A global pharmaceutical company was preparing to launch a new treatment for multiple sclerosis. The brand team recognised that their existing content strategy relied on clinical language and medical messaging that failed to connect emotionally with the patients they were trying to reach. They needed a fundamentally different approach to content creation — one that started with the patient experience rather than the product profile.

The Approach

Merakoi recruited patient experts and content creators living with MS across multiple countries. Rather than asking patients to simply review pre-made materials, merakoi embedded them as co-designers from the very first brief. Patient experts worked alongside the brand team to shape messaging, tone of voice, visual direction, and channel strategy. They contributed lived-experience insights that no focus group or advisory board could replicate — the daily realities, emotional triggers, and information needs that shape how people with MS actually engage with health content.

The Outcome

The content co-created with patient experts performed 10x better than the team’s benchmarks across the multichannel launch campaign. Engagement rates, click-throughs, and content completion metrics all exceeded expectations by an order of magnitude. The project demonstrated that patient-led content creation is not a compliance exercise or a nice-to-have — it is a performance multiplier. The brand team has since adopted patient co-creation as a standard practice for all major campaign initiatives.