This morning, in the middle of a heat wave that Portugal meteorologists had been tracking for days, I received an SMS from my health insurer. Generali. Not a renewal reminder, campaign offer, or link to a product page. Just a short message reminding me to stay hydrated, avoid the sun during peak hours, and take care.

I noticed it precisely because it did not ask anything of me.

What presence marketing actually is

Most brand communication is organized around an ask. Buy this. Click here. Sign up now. Renew before your policy expires. Even content marketing, for all its positioning as value-first, is usually a funnel in disguise: the blog post that ends with a form, the newsletter that drives traffic, the helpful guide that converts. The ask is structural, even when politely hidden.

Presence marketing is different. It is the practice of showing up in a customer's life at a moment when the brand has something genuinely useful to contribute, without attaching a direct commercial objective to the contribution. That SMS had a cost: the monetary cost of sending it, and the subtler cost of using up a communication slot with a customer who might otherwise have received something more immediately measurable. Generali spent that budget without expecting a trackable return. CRM exists precisely to attribute behavior to touchpoints, and post-SMS movement is measurable even without a link. But that is not the point of this message, and the people who sent it presumably knew that. The goal was not conversion. It was presence.

This is not a new idea. What is new is how rare it has become.

The overcommunication problem

Research consistently shows that consumers prefer four to five brand interactions per month, and that over-communicating or being too generic actively erodes trust (Adobe, 2025). Muting, blocking, or algorithmically suppressing brand messages has shifted from a temporary behaviour to a more permanent reconfiguration of how consumers manage their attention. When people actively restructure their digital environment to keep a brand out of it, the brand has failed at something more fundamental than engagement metrics (Balaskas et al., Journal of Marketing, 2025).

The overcommunication problem is not primarily about volume. It is about relevance and intent. A brand that sends five messages a month, all promotional, is experienced differently from a brand that sends five messages a month, one of which is a heat wave safety reminder. The number is identical. The relationship it builds is not.

According to Capgemini's 2026 research, consumer trust in brands is rebuilt not through better campaigns but through moments that still require judgment: customer escalations, community engagement, crisis response, moments where a brand makes a considered decision rather than executing a template (Avaans Media, 2026). The Generali SMS is a small version of that. Someone, at some point, decided it was worth sending a message that would never appear in a revenue attribution model.

The category problem

There is a particular irony in the fact that this came from a health insurer. Insurance is one of the categories most associated with transactional, adversarial, or at best indifferent customer relationships. The business model is built on risk calculation, not care. The most common touchpoints are premium notices, policy renewals, and claims processing, none of which are experiences anyone looks forward to.

Which is exactly what makes a non-promotional, care-oriented message from an insurer so striking. The contrast is doing the work. If Generali sent wellness content every week, that SMS would have landed differently, or not at all. It worked because it was unexpected in its category and specific in its timing. Heat wave. Wednesday. Portugal. Stay hydrated.

This is what presence marketing requires that most brand teams are not set up to deliver: contextual judgment. The ability to identify a moment where the brand can be genuinely useful and act on it without attaching a conversion goal. That judgment is harder to scale than a campaign, harder to measure than a click-through rate, and harder to justify in a quarterly review. Which is why most brands do not do it.

What this builds over time

Clutch's 2025 research found that 55% of consumers say their brand loyalty has shifted in the last five years, away from price and quality toward transparency, trust, and authenticity (Portada, 2025). Loyalty is increasingly earned through experience rather than advertising. The brands gaining ground are not the ones with the best promotional mechanics. They are the ones that feel, over time, like something worth trusting.

That trust is built incrementally, through small moments of considered presence. A message sent without expecting a measurable return. Information that serves the customer without serving the brand's short-term interests. A brand that shows up without asking for anything back.

None of this will trend or appear in a Cannes Lions case study. But it is exactly the kind of thing that makes a customer notice a brand in a way that stays.

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Photo by Bence Szemerey: https://www.pexels.com/photo/men-playing-in-splashing-water-7081252/

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References

• Balaskas, S. et al. (2025). Personalized Touchpoints and Customer Experience: A Conceptual Synthesis. ResearchGate / Journal of Marketing. Link
• Avaans Media. (2026). Consumer Brand Trust Trends for 2026. Link
• Portada / Clutch. (2025). Brand Experience 2025: Transparency and Trust Redefine Loyalty. Link
• Adobe. (2025). From Crowded Markets to Committed Customers: 2025 Insights to Improve Customer Loyalty. Link
• BCG. (2026). Future of Influence: Mapping Consumer Touchpoints That Drive Decisions. Link

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