Published on: April 27, 2026
Prasun Kumar is a seasoned strategist with over two decades of skin in the game across telecom, retail, and consumer tech. As the Chief Marketing Officer at Magicbricks, he is steering India’s property giant away from cold data toward a warmer, trust-first philosophy.
In this exclusive interaction, he explains why real estate is about shifting human behavior rather than just selling square footage. He explores how content builds credibility, why brand power beats rising CPCs, and how the modern female homebuyer is rewriting the rules. For Prasun, it’s about using digital precision to find more room for human connection.
Your career spans telecom, retail, and consumer tech. How has that cross-sector experience shaped your category-building approach to real estate marketing?
Every industry I have worked in taught me something irreplaceable about the consumer. Telecom taught me scale, the art of reaching millions while still making each person feel seen. Retail taught me aspiration, how a product becomes an identity statement. Consumer tech taught me adoption psychology, specifically that people embrace new things only when they trust them completely.
When I came to real estate, I carried all of that forward. The category in India had enormous latent energy but was held back by opacity, complexity, and fragmented consumer experiences. My cross-sector lens told me that the real opportunity was not just to build a better listings platform but to build a brand that earns genuine trust at the most consequential financial moment in a person’s life.
“Category building is really about shifting consumer behaviour at a fundamental level, and that requires patience, consistency, and a deep understanding of what people feel, not just what they search for”.
That has been my north star at Magicbricks.
You launched MBTV to bridge the real estate trust gap. How does this content-first approach translate into actual conversions?
MBTV came from a very honest observation. A home is not an impulse purchase. People spend months researching, comparing, second guessing, and seeking reassurance before they make a move. Yet, most developers, real estate marketing, were treating
them like they were ready to transact immediately. There was a massive trust gap between where consumers were emotionally and where sellers wanted them to be commercially. MBTV was our answer to that gap.
By creating India’s first dedicated real estate content platform on YouTube, we gave buyers something they genuinely needed, which was clarity. Deep dives into projects, neighbourhood walkthroughs, market trend analyses, developer credibility checks. When someone arrives at Magicbricks after watching that kind of content, they are not a cold lead. They are an informed, confident, and motivated buyer. That fundamentally changes conversion quality. Trust, when built authentically through content, becomes the most durable and cost-effective performance channel available to any brand.
“With a 1.75mn + subscriber base, MBTV is the world ‘s largest real estate channel and is the first port of call for all ecosystem players including consumers.”
With rising CPCs defining digital marketing today, how do you balance long-term brand building with performance efficiency?
The temptation when CPCs rise is to become purely tactical, to chase short-term numbers and deprioritise brands. I have always resisted that temptation because I believe it is a false economy.
“When your brand is strong, your cost of acquisition naturally comes down over time because people seek you out rather than needing to be found.”
At Magicbricks, we have doubled down on making brand and performance work as one integrated system rather than two competing priorities. Our campaigns are built on genuine human stories.
Our Pata Badlo, Life Badlo campaign is a perfect example — it wasn’t just a communication exercise. It became a powerful proof point of how migration shapes opportunity, income, and long-term wealth creation in India, while simultaneously driving measurable traffic outcomes. Brand equity, when built right, lowers your cost of acquisition over time. Simultaneously, we invest heavily in AI driven targeting, personalisation, and real time optimisation to ensure every rupee works as hard as possible. The two are not in conflict. They amplify each other.
With more women making independent home-buying decisions, how has Magicbricks adapted its targeting strategy?
This is one of the most exciting and important shifts we are witnessing in Indian real estate. Women are no longer passive participants in the home-buying conversation. They are primary decision makers, conducting independent research, evaluating neighbourhoods, comparing developers, and driving the final call. This demographic shift deserves a strategic response, not just a cosmetic one.
“The modern woman homebuyer wants to be empowered, not sold to, and every product and marketing decision we make is increasingly shaped by that understanding.”
We have adapted across multiple dimensions. Our content addresses the concerns that matter most to women buyers, which include neighbourhood safety, community infrastructure, school and healthcare proximity, and long-term liveability. Our visual and social content strategies have been calibrated for platforms and formats where women engage most deeply.
As Instagram becomes a discovery platform for property, how do you compress a six-month home search journey into engaging social content?
The home search journey has always been long because the decision is enormous. What Instagram has done is not shorten that journey but transform how it begins and how momentum builds through it.
“Discovery now happens in a scroll, in a Reel, in a visually arresting piece of content that makes someone stop and think, I want to know more about that neighbourhood.”
Our approach has been to map content to the emotional stages of the buyer journey rather than trying to replicate the entire journey in a single piece. We create content that inspires at the awareness stage, informs at the consideration stage, and validates at the intent stage. A beautifully shot neighbourhood Reel creates aspiration. A quick market trend breakdown builds confidence. A genuine buyer testimonial provides the social proof that converts interest into action. Instagram did not just become a supporting channel for us. It became a genuine business driver because we treated it with the same strategic seriousness as any performance channel, while respecting the visual, emotional, and fast-moving language native to the platform.
You’ve pointed to cities like Lucknow and Bhopal as the next real estate frontiers. What buyer behaviors differentiate these markets from traditional hubs?
The energy coming out of cities like Lucknow and Bhopal is genuinely exciting, and I think the mainstream market is only beginning to appreciate what is unfolding there. Infrastructure investment, improving connectivity, and a growing professional class are creating real estate momentum that rivals what we saw in metros a decade ago.
What makes these markets distinct is the nature of the buyer. In metros, a large proportion of transactions involve upgrades or investment portfolios. In Lucknow or Bhopal, you are often dealing with first generation homeowners, people for whom this purchase represents something far deeper than square footage or price per square foot. It is a statement of arrival, of progress, of building something permanent for their families. That buyer is deeply aspirational, highly research-driven, and places enormous value on trust and credibility. Word of mouth and community validation carry far more weight than they do in metro markets.
For Magicbricks, succeeding in these cities means going beyond digital reach and earning grassroots trust. It means speaking the local cultural language, reflecting local realities in our content, and building a platform experience that feels genuinely relevant. That localisation at depth is the real frontier, and it is one we are investing in with great enthusiasm.
