AMA Pittsburgh Coffee Connections: 2026 Marketing Trends

Coffee Connections is our monthly in-person roundtable discussion where we invite an expert speaker to lead discussions on trending topics in marketing and business.

Topic for 1/28/26

2026 Marketing Trends Coffee Connections
The New Rules of Value Creation

Marketing is entering a reset. Not a hype cycle, not a tool shift, but a structural change in how value is created, trusted, and delivered.

We'll explore the forces shaping 2026 and what they mean in practice. Get ready for a conversation about how marketing work, teams, and expectations are changing.

We’ll look at four shifts that are already underway:

• The modern marketing career path. How the job market is flattening, why mid-layers are thinning out, and what “specialized generalism” really means for early-career marketers and leaders building teams.
• Trust as the primary growth constraint. Why volume no longer equals influence, how skepticism is reshaping channels and budgets, and what human-verified authority looks like in a synthetic world.
• Agentic commerce and the automated buyer. What happens when decisions are delegated to systems, not people—and how marketers adapt when persuasion gives way to presence in automated ecosystems.
• Experience as architecture. Why the next generation doesn’t separate product, marketing, and brand—and how growth increasingly comes from the design of the experience itself.

You’ll leave ready to respond to what’s changing with stronger points of view you can take back to your organization, and perspectives from marketers facing the same realities you are.

About the speaker

Christopher Bevel is president of AMA Pittsburgh and a Digital Product Principal at FedEx, responsible for shaping vision, strategy and execution for digital products that deepen customer relationships, streamline operations and drive growth across the enterprise. With more than 20 years of experience in digital strategy, product, marketing, and experience design, he is known for bringing curiosity, experimentation and data-driven decision making to every engagement.​

Christopher’s work blends design thinking, agile product management, analytics and AI methods to uncover insights, validate ideas quickly and scale what works. ​

Prior to his current role, Christopher held marketing and digital leadership positions focused on brand vision, go-to-market and channel strategy, as well as founding Bevelroom Consulting, a consultancy focused on customer-centric demand generation for service businesses. In that capacity, he partnered with fast growing firms as a fractional CMO to help them grow more effectively through customer-centric advantage.

Know what’s Happening Next — before everyone else does.

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Host or Publisher AMA Pittsburgh