A bottle of Coke can be chosen between the entrance and the checkout. A home asks for considerably more. It gathers money, geography, taste, family plans and a picture of the future into one decision. When Manish Shrivastava joined PulteGroup as vice president and chief marketing officer in September 2014, he arrived with a career built around understanding why consumers choose. Homebuilding gave that discipline a new scale.
Shrivastava had worked in the brand-management system at Procter & Gamble, managed marketing at BabyCenter, consulted, spent seven years at The Home Depot and then led brand and shopper-marketing work at The Coca-Cola Company. He knew packaged goods, online communities, stores and the mechanics of a global brand. At PulteGroup, all of those lenses would be useful. None would be sufficient on its own.
His own early description of the move was exact. Buying and building a new home, he said, is a “wonderful and complex life event.” The adjective that matters is complex. A buyer is not comparing labels on a shelf. The value equation includes the house, its location, its amenities, its bedrooms and the lived experience those components may produce. Marketing cannot sit at the end of that equation and decorate it. It has to help the company understand it.
“This industry has a very complex value equation that has to be fulfilled for a consumer.”Manish Shrivastava
The career is a set of lenses
The route to that problem began with biology. Shrivastava earned a bachelor’s degree in the subject at the University of South Carolina, then completed an MBA at Northwestern University’s Kellogg School of Management. The degrees point in different directions, but the working habit that joins them is observation: study a system, identify what drives it, test how it responds.
Each job added a layer. P&G offered the discipline of brand management. BabyCenter placed him inside an online community organized around a major life transition. Home Depot brought stores, contractors, installation services, loyalty and distinct customer groups into view. Coca-Cola joined global brand work to the precise moment when a shopper decides what to put in a basket.
Then came the house, a product that may not yet exist when someone commits to it. It is discovered online and experienced in person. It is a piece of design, an asset, a construction project and a setting for ordinary Tuesday mornings. Shrivastava’s remit at PulteGroup reflects that sprawl: brand management, marketing communications, digital marketing, market intelligence, consumer research, field marketing and interior design.
Let the buyer see the unbuilt
In 2017, one practical obstacle offered a clean test of this wider view. Many prospective buyers struggle to understand a three-dimensional home from a two-dimensional floor plan. The company consumer-tested several virtual-reality formats, including fully immersive experiences, before integrating the technology into the sales process for an Atlanta community.
The consumer problem, rather than the novelty of the technology, gave the experiment its point: close the imagination gap. “Virtual reality is an engaging way to interact with a new home design,” Shrivastava said. He contrasted it with a static tour: the buyer could see and experience a design before the construction site could provide the experience itself.
That distinction is a compact lesson in useful marketing technology. Begin with the friction, not the gadget. The buyer’s question was deeply human: can I picture myself here? The headset earned its place only if it made the answer easier.
Research that reaches the floor plan
A second test arrived when people began asking much more of their homes in 2020. Work, school, exercise, storage and recreation compressed into the same address. PulteGroup’s response drew on consumer research and reached into the design itself: dedicated office space, stronger wired connectivity, larger pantries, flexible learning areas and outdoor living moved from observed needs into offered features.
For a marketing organization, this is the consequential leap. Consumer insight can improve targeting and copy. It can also alter wiring, storage and room use. Shrivastava’s oversight of both research and interior design puts the promise unusually close to the thing being promised. The feedback loop runs from what people say and do to what the company puts on a plan.
Pulte Homes later worked with designer Sabrina Soto on a digital video series that demonstrated how those spaces could support work, focused learning, entertainment and everyday life. It gave the designs an interpreter. A room shown in use communicates something a list of dimensions cannot.
“The consumer inspiration comes from a deep understanding of the consumer. What’s their journey? What’s important to them?”Manish Shrivastava
The signal inside an old brand
Del Webb presented a different kind of puzzle. Its name carried a clear proposition: active, amenity-rich communities for buyers aged 55 and older. That definition created strength. It also created a boundary.
PulteGroup’s research found meaningful demand for the Del Webb experience among people who did not want the age limitation. Some were younger. Some wanted older children at home, regular visits from grandchildren or simply neighbors across a wider range of ages. They liked the clubhouses, fitness centers, pools, pickleball courts, trails and built-in social calendar. The lifestyle fit better than the rule.
The answer launched in March 2025 as Del Webb Explore, an all-ages resort-lifestyle extension. Its first communities were planned for Palm Desert, California, and the Tampa Bay area. The homes and amenities preserve recognizable elements of Del Webb while opening the community to every generation. Shrivastava described the intended buyer through experiences, connection, convenience and flexibility rather than through a birthday.
This is brand extension as subtraction. Keep the useful promise. Remove the constraint that prevented another customer from accepting it. The insight is operational because it does not end with a campaign. It requires communities, floor plans, amenities, sales systems and a national rollout evaluated market by market.
It also reveals the advantage of a portfolio. PulteGroup can speak to first-time buyers, move-up buyers and active adults through different brands, while research looks for needs that fall between the existing labels. A gap between categories can reveal a product waiting for a name.
The house beyond the front door
Shrivastava’s public language around Del Webb repeatedly moves past the structure. When the brand introduced its “Decisions” television campaign in 2023, he described the emotional hook as the life that follows the choice of a community. The home matters, but so do the neighbors, activities and routines that gather around it. Marketing a place therefore means presenting a possible calendar as much as a possible kitchen.
That idea became measurable in 2026, when PulteGroup’s market research group surveyed 1,301 Del Webb residents across 14 states. Ninety-one percent said they felt socially connected at that stage of life, 71 percent said where they lived made forming meaningful connections easier, and 51 percent reported becoming more socially engaged after moving to their community. The answers show why the spaces between homes belong in the value equation, even when friendship resists a tidy amenity checklist.
A clubhouse can be photographed. A pickleball court can be counted. Belonging is less concrete, yet the layout and programming of a community can create repeated occasions for people to meet. Shrivastava described Del Webb’s goal as designing around connection and helping social bonds grow among neighbors. For a marketer, this is another expansion of the product boundary. The work begins with what can be built, then asks what that built environment makes easier to do.
Marketing as an operating function
In 2019, Shrivastava received a CMO Growth Award, a recognition tied to the use of technology and data science to make digital marketing more effective and efficient. Yet the revealing evidence of his approach is less tidy than an award: the repeated movement from observed behavior to a company decision.
A buyer cannot see an unbuilt home, so the sales experience gains a virtual layer. Daily routines change, so wiring and rooms change with them. A trusted lifestyle brand attracts people outside its formal audience, so the boundary moves. In each case, marketing behaves less like an announcement department and more like an operating system for attention.
That may be what Shrivastava carried from the checkout aisle into homebuilding. The moment of choice never belongs to the advertisement alone. It belongs to the fit between a person’s circumstances and the product in front of them. The larger and more emotional the purchase, the more parts of the company must help create that fit.
A home remains an unusually demanding object to market. The buyer expects it to become a familiar, cluttered, social and personal place. The job begins with attracting attention. It ends much later, when the promise has walls around it.