The relentless volume of brand communication is a key contributor to both workplace and personal burnout, quietly accumulating stress and eroding trust.
In fact, Twilio’s Age of Distraction Report reveals that the average Brit now receives 25 non-work notifications a day and carries over 1,000 unread emails before factoring in the time-consuming brand admin tasks.
With Stress Awareness Month shining a light on the pressures consumers face, brands need to focus on what they can do to design more intentional engagement before the damage becomes irreversible.
Sam Richardson, Executive Engagement Director at Twilio, told CX Today that excessive and poorly targeted marketing signals a clear lack of customer understanding.
“Frequency without value is one of the fastest ways to erode trust,” she explained.
“When communication feels excessive, generic or poorly timed, it signals that a brand is prioritizing visibility over genuinely understanding its customers.
“The impact is also cumulative, with every irrelevant message making it harder for the next one to land.”
The Trust Cost of Constant Communication
Today, consumers are becoming increasingly distrustful of brands that communicate too frequently, reacting to what high frequency signals about how a brand sees them and uses their data.
When communication from a brand becomes constant, this can feel automated and indiscriminate for consumers, with many messages arriving regardless of context, need, or timing, this creates the impression that a brand is optimizing for its own output rather than the customer’s relevance.
With 67% of consumers feeling like a commodity, repetition without clear value suggests the individual is interchangeable.
When consumers receiving multiple messages across channels, often with different tones, offers, or timing, it becomes harder to interpret what is genuine and what is part of the campaign cycle.
This can cause a cognitive overload; by receiving too much information, customers can mentally group this brand with spam, meaning even relevant messages lose their credibility.
“As individuals, we are becoming far more intentional with where we direct our time,” explained Richardson.
“Faced with a constant flow of messages, we’re quicker to tune out, unsubscribe, or disengage from brands that don’t respect their time.”
Customer trust also plays an important role, with 57% of consumers saying they are unsure of which interactions to trust, this reflects how inconsistent messaging and high communication volume make it harder to distinguish between useful, relevant outreach and automated or self-serving contact.
As a result, overcommunication can shift the marketer-consumer relationship from selective and purposeful to mechanical and extractive, driving distrust and irritation.
When Engagement Becomes a Burden
Constant notification and high-volume messaging can therefore increase stress by turning brand interaction into a persistent demand on attention and time, asking customers to evaluate, decide, or act, frequently taking more time to complete than hoped.
When customers are repeatedly asked to give back to brands, especially with longer tasks, this creates cognitive fatigue, as consumers begin to feel that brands are competing for their attention rather than respecting it.
“From difficulties getting in touch with customer service, through to being put on hold or passed around departments,” said Richardson.
“Twilio research found 49% consider this ‘brandmin’ to be a significant chore, chewing up time and increasing stress levels.”
This “brandmin” overload reflects that many customers see this chore burden as not occasional but ongoing.
Service friction can also worsen this problem, meaning when customers have trouble reaching support, are placed on hold, or are passed between departments, this adds time costs to already frequent interactions and reinforces the idea that brands are inefficient or indifferent to the customer’s time.
As a result, this shifts the relationship from supportive to burdensome, increasing stress, reducing responsiveness, and leads to gradual disengagement.
Designing Intentional Engagement
Brands can design more intentional engagement by focusing on relevance, timing, and restraint in their strategies, meaning reducing unnecessary touchpoints and prioritizing messages that align with a clear user need or moment in the customer journey.
Despite high brand awareness around intentional customer engagement, this strategy is not clearly translating to the consumer.
In fact, Twilio’s report reveals that 77% of consumers have never felt a genuine sense of community from a brand, signaling a gap in both emotional connection and marketing reach.
Customer communities are built through consistency, relevance, and recognition of the individual, not through frequent contact, so when brands reduce noise and increase meaning, engagement becomes easier for consumers to manage and more rewarding when it occurs.
“It’s about designing journeys that feel connected and considered, rather than a series of disconnected touchpoints,” explained Richardson.
By introducing intentional engagement, marketers can move customer experiences from volume-based communication to value-based interaction.
“The brands that succeed will be those that treat attention as something to be earned, not assumed,” Richardson continued.
“When communication is relevant, timely and genuinely useful, it’s more likely to cut through and build stronger, longer lasting relationships in the process.”
When brands stop competing for every moment of attention, they create space for consumer trust to develop, supporting stronger, long-term recall and deeper loyalty because interactions feel chosen rather than imposed.
Designing systems that minimise friction and reduce unnecessary prompts while improving service quality when interaction is required.
By aligning marketing, product, and customer support so that communication feels coherent across channels, brands that adopt this approach are more likely to sustain long-term relationships because they fit more naturally into the customer’s digital life, rather than disrupting it.
