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Matteo Borea, strategic consultant and owner of the La Genovese roastery in Albenga (Savona), presents his first analysis for 2026, inspired by the Connecting the Dots 2026 research published by GWI.
by Matteo Borea
ALBENGA, Italy – Every year, new marketing trends are announced as if they were revolutionary. Artificial intelligence, social media evolution, new generations, community, sustainability. The vocabulary changes slightly, but the narrative stays the same. And the coffee industry, once again, rushes to adapt by copying language, formats, and tools.
This article is inspired by Connecting the Dots 2026, a global consumer research published by GWI, based on millions of interviews conducted across more than fifty markets worldwide. It offers a clear picture of how people’s expectations, behaviors, and decision-making processes are evolving. But as often happens, the real issue is not the research itself. It is how these insights are translated into action, especially in a sector like coffee, where imitation is often mistaken for strategy.
Trends do not destroy businesses. Misinterpretation does.
Artificial intelligence is a perfect example. In theory, AI should help brands become more efficient, more relevant, more precise. In practice, for many coffee businesses, it is accelerating a dangerous process: homogenization. The same tools, trained on the same public data, used with the same prompts, inevitably produce similar outputs. Content looks polished, campaigns look “correct” but everything sounds familiar. And familiar is invisible.
AI does not generate originality. It amplifies what already exists. If a company lacks a clear positioning, a strong narrative, or proprietary data, AI will not fix that. It will simply make the lack of identity more scalable. This is something I often address in my blog and in my newsletter, because I see too many coffee entrepreneurs focusing on automation while ignoring the strategic foundation underneath it.
The same logic applies to marketing campaigns. Many coffee brands still believe that demand can be activated with the right promotion at the right time. But consumer behavior has changed. People do not buy when brands decide to sell. They buy when they feel ready. And when that moment arrives, they rarely start from zero. They choose the brand they already recognize, the one they trust, the one that feels familiar.
If you were not present before that moment, no discount will save you. Quality alone will not save you either. This is one of the hardest truths to accept in the coffee industry, where craftsmanship and product excellence are often considered sufficient. They are not. They are the entry ticket, not the differentiator.
Social media reinforces this dynamic. Platforms are no longer digital noticeboards. They are entertainment ecosystems driven by algorithms and attention economics. A coffee brand is not competing only with other roasters anymore. It is competing with creators, podcasts, series, and infinite streams of content. Visibility is no longer a matter of frequency, but of relevance.
This does not mean chasing trends or trying to be entertaining at all costs. It means having a point of view. A recognizable voice. If your content could belong to anyone in the industry, then it does not belong to you. Consistency, clarity, and identity matter more than creativity alone.
One of the most interesting signals emerging from the GWI research concerns younger generations. Not because of their age, but because of their mindset. They approach brands as cultural actors, not just suppliers. Coffee is expected. Experience, meaning, and context are what make the difference. This is why the future of coffee shops and coffee brands is no longer coffee-centric.
Coffee is becoming the starting point, not the destination. What really matters is the environment built around it: social, emotional, cultural. Hybrid formats, mixed-use spaces, and new daily rituals are not marginal experiments. They are signals of a deeper transformation. Selling better coffee is no longer enough. Creating spaces where coffee makes sense is the real challenge.
In this scenario, talking about marketing without talking about strategy is pointless. Strategy has become what terroir once was: the true source of differentiation. It is the ability to choose, to say no, to resist imitation. To translate global trends into decisions that make sense for a specific identity, a specific market, and a specific vision.
The mistake many coffee businesses make is looking at global trends and trying to replicate them literally. But trends are not instructions. They are signals. They require interpretation. Without that interpretative effort, innovation becomes mimicry, and mimicry leads to irrelevance.
The coffee industry does not suffer from a lack of information. It suffers from a lack of perspective. 2026 will not reward those who follow every trend. It will reward those who understand which ones to ignore, which ones to adapt, and which ones do not belong to their business at all.
I have collected these reflections and translated the insights from the GWI Connecting the Dots 2026 report into concrete implications for coffee entrepreneurs in a more extensive guide, available on my blog here: https://matteoborea.it/coffee-marketing-strategy-2026
Not a checklist but a strategic lens for those who want to stay relevant in a coffee world that is changing faster than ever.
Matteo Borea
