I worked pretty closely with said "marketing experts" a few times. Some of them were pretty smart folks, some were not (IMHO). They were all MBAs from prestigious universities. I was doing some internal analyses of historical data which I presented and they found ... radical. They didn't seem to be much for "history" of their brands.
They eventually offered me a job of some sort, I didn't pursue it, my director was urging me to take it and perhaps it would have been a good career move. They had a distinct "up or out" mentality. If they weren't promoted in ~five years, they'd leave, their resume would look pretty good elsewhere. In R&D, most folks would stick around for decades even with the usual very slow promotion tract.
