> dismiss properly conducted marketing as something which is for weak and stupid people.

I didn't say that. I think it's dismissed more because the majority of marketing campaigns send out a dishonest message, and because of that customers are getting more and more insensitive to such campaigns.

And I also don't think it is an engineering process in the traditional way (although it's fashionable for everything that has a feedback loop to be called engineering these days). Marketing is more about social interactions, being more inline with humanities / social sciences ... and it takes a certain kind of skill-set to be good at it, and I've seen too few technical people being good at it.