Simply Speaking: When the Tribe Forgot the Wanderer

Marketing, by forgetting its outsider origins, has become an insular, self-preserving tribe that risks extinction unless it reopens itself to osmosis.

Marketing was never meant to be a closed circuit. Its greatest triumphs are those campaigns, brands, and flashes of imagination that rewired how people saw the world and these were rarely born inside marketing departments.

Simply Speaking: When Creativity meets Corporate Culture

They came from the outside, from minds that didn’t entirely belong but were inspired. The outsider was once the oxygen of the discipline. Today, that oxygen is depleted.

As marketing has professionalised, it has also insulated itself. What began as a craft of curiosity has hardened into a bureaucracy of expertise. The tribe has learned to guard its borders by speaking in code, hiring from familiar schools, and defining legitimacy through the narrow lens of certification.

What was once porous and improvisational has become a sealed, self-reinforcing system.

The Cost of Conformity

Look inside many marketing departments today, and the sameness is striking. The same dashboards, templates, and performance reviews that reward safety over surprise. The language is technical, fluent, and precise but it rarely sparks.

Over time, expertise becomes repetition. The field’s grammar suffocates the imagination.

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It isn’t that specialisation is harmful but rather that it works too well. Precision, honed to perfection, leaves little space for the intuitive or the accidental. A field that becomes too fluent in itself starts mistaking eloquence for imagination. The irony is that expertise, when unchallenged, stops evolving. What you gain in accuracy is lost in perspective. The emergence of AI automation will multiply this manifold because it never originates but merely regurgitates.

Why the Outsider’s View Matters

Progress in any domain depends on creative distance being near enough to understand a field, but far enough to question it. Outsiders occupy this hinge. They make associative leaps that insiders, bound by convention, no longer see. The best ideas are born not from mastery alone, but from the friction between knowing and not knowing.

Marketing once lived in that overlap space between commerce and culture, psychology and poetry, art and arithmetic. That hybridity was its superpower. It drew from the irrational, the intuitive, and the emotional to reveal patterns the analyst could not. When the discipline forgets this lineage, it loses its interpretive range.

Harm in Homogeneity

Homogeneity breeds blindness. When everyone uses the same frameworks and tools, imagination withers. Method overtakes meaning while process squashes possibility. The tribe becomes self referenced, trading curiosity for compliance.

This nature of mutual peer review coziness is also the rot that is eating academia.

The Grand Irony: Agencies That Built Brands, Forgot to Build For Themselves

Outsiders once kept marketing honest by forcing it to translate, to defend, to reimagine its assumptions. Without them, the field collapses inward. It celebrates its own sophistication while quietly losing relevance. The cost is not just bad campaigns but so many ideas never articulated , instincts never tested, risks never taken.

Rekindling the Outsider’s Fire

If marketing is to recover its creative pulse, it must relearn intellectual hospitality. It must welcome the unfamiliar question, the amateur’s curiosity, the interdisciplinary lens.

True renewal lies in restoring permeability and osmosis. What’s the risk in allowing art to interrupt analytics ? Where is the cost in letting culture to collide with commerce ? Where is the conflict in permitting instinct to coexist with data?

The discipline’s future depends less on mastery than on mingling. We are a discipline of the wanderer. Marketing acts less on precision and more on perspective. Marketing was born in curiosity and it will die in consensus.

Its renewal begins the moment it dares to listen to an outsider again.

Open the gates.

Shubhranshu Singh is a marketing leader, cultural strategist, and columnist. He was honoured as one of the 50 most influential global CMOs for 2025 by Forbes and serves on the inaugural board of the Effie LIONS Foundation.