> pricing strategy, distribution, understanding your sales channels and building relationships with your key customers for example

Pricing can definitely be marketing and is crucial to the company. The rest sounds more like operations and customer relations to me.

Otherwise I agree bullshitting can be interesting and analytical, when looking at a full campaign promoting a life style or solely aimed at imprinting the brand, it's full on the fuzzy side but it is all extremely thought out, and grounded in relatively solid research when it comes to the bigger players.