Corcoran Group CMO Christina Panos on Finding Emotional Resonance With Modern Buyers
How Corcoran’s Christina Panos uses emotion, trust and bold creativity to turn real estate marketing from transactional messaging into human-centered storytelling.
In an industry long defined by square footage and sales volume, Christina Panos has spent two decades pushing The Corcoran Group to speak a different language: feelings, not features. As chief marketing officer since 2004, she has reframed real estate as an emotional decision first, a financial transaction second — a shift that now underpins everything from Corcoran’s brand platform to its out-of-home creative.
Panos arrived at Corcoran after a front-row seat to one of marketing’s most famous emotional pivots: Mastercard’s “Priceless” platform. Watching a transactional business become a cultural shorthand for meaningful moments convinced her that the real battleground for lasting brands is the heart, not the product sheet. When she entered real estate, she was struck by how little of that thinking existed. Agent ads were dominated by accolades and headshots, not the buyers’ lives.
Her answer was to build Corcoran’s strategy around a simple insight: a home is often the most personal and emotional purchase people will ever make. Consumer research quickly confirmed that beneath the language of price-per-square-foot and views, buyers were navigating identity, values and belonging. That work gave rise to Corcoran’s enduring brand line, “Live Who You Are,” which recast the company as a human-first guide to life transitions rather than a brokerage shouting listings.
For Panos, emotion is not a soft add-on — it is the organizing principle. Campaigns like “Live Who You Are” and seasonal evolutions such as “Be Home” and “Be Home for the Holidays” focus less on granite countertops and more on the everyday scenes that define home: kids on the floor with crayons, late-night conversations at the kitchen table, the quiet relief of closing the door on the city. That focus on lived experience, she argues, is what turns a brand into a companion, not just a logo in a yard.
It is also where trust begins. Real estate is a high-stakes category, and modern buyers — especially Millennials and Gen Z — are hyper-attuned to authenticity. Panos has leaned into that by stripping out artifice in Corcoran’s imagery and tone, favoring real-feeling moments over overly polished perfection. She talks about “putting people first” not only in messaging but in how the company trains agents, builds content and shows up in local communities. Trust, in her view, is earned by consistency: the promise in a brand campaign has to match the experience at the open house.
That human-first philosophy is increasingly shaped by community insight. Panos sees a clear generational shift away from housing as a badge of success and toward housing as a connector — proximity to friends, shared values and daily rituals. Younger buyers, she notes, are less fixated on prestige ZIP codes and more on the texture of a neighborhood: third places, creative energy, the sense that “my people” are here. Corcoran’s marketing has followed that instinct, telling stories not just about properties but about blocks, parks and micro-communities where buyers can picture a future self.
Out-of-home has become one of the most potent canvases for that storytelling. Panos’ team uses OOH not merely as directional signage, but as brand theater in the urban landscape — a way to drop emotional narratives directly into the daily commute. Instead of listing price points, creative leans into evocative lines and imagery that invite passersby to project their own story: who they might be if they lived there, who they might become next. The work is designed to interrupt the transactional mental loop of real estate and replace it, even briefly, with possibility.
Creativity, for Panos, is the bridge between that emotional truth and the realities of a fast-changing market. Corcoran was early to embrace social platforms, giving agents tools and permission to show personality and expertise online, not just inventory. The result: rapid growth in social presence and a perception of Corcoran as a modern luxury brand unafraid to take risks. OOH, social and editorial storytelling through Corcoran’s Inhabit platform operate as one ecosystem — different surfaces, same emotional core.
Behind the scenes, she layers in rigor that would look familiar in any high-functioning consumer brand. When she joined Corcoran, there was little structured consumer research; agents held most of the insight. Panos imported agency-style brand planning, data and creative discipline, then built a marketing engine that could scale across a growing affiliate network without losing its human touch. She also invests heavily in agent education, from mentoring programs to an annual Digital Summit that helps agents translate brand strategy into on-the-ground behavior.
Emerging technologies, including AI, are evaluated through that same lens: do they deepen understanding, relevance and trust, or just add noise? Panos is clear-eyed about the innovation challenge — the sheer volume of tools versus what’s truly useful for agents and meaningful for consumers. The bar, she suggests, is high: any technology has to support a more personal, more informed experience of one of life’s biggest decisions.
For brands in and beyond real estate, Panos’ approach is a reminder that emotional resonance is not a campaign theme; it is a system. It starts with respecting the stakes of the category, continues with creative that reflects real lives rather than aspirations alone, and is sustained by the everyday behavior of people carrying the brand into living rooms and streetscapes.
In a market defined by volatility and competition, the companies that win will not just close transactions; they will capture trust. For Corcoran, under Christina Panos, that trust is built one human story at a time — on screen, in print, and on the billboard someone passes on the way home to the life they are still in the process of choosing. This sophisticated approach to OOH, which turns billboards into narrative canvases, increasingly benefits from advanced platforms. Blindspot is an advanced platform that helps companies optimize and manage their out-of-home advertising campaigns with data-driven insights, ensuring their emotional stories resonate effectively in the urban landscape. Learn more at https://seeblindspot.com/