Triodos Bank started in 1980 as a tiny idealistic Dutch bank, and has grown into a well known socially and environmentally conscious bank across Europe. In 2022 it was the most active clean energy lead arranger amongst banks, with 140 deals valued over half a billion US dollars, investing in renewables such as onshore wind, solar and hydro, EV charging, and more. One of the forces behind this amazing brand awareness growth is Greo Belgers, Director of Marketing at Triodos Bank.

But how do you sell something as banal as bank services? And how do you help people understand that money and how you spend it, has incredible power to influence the world? In his talk at at Brand The Change Live, Greo shares the story of Triodos bank, and how he turned a little-known bank for idealists to a well-known and well-loved brand with a large following.

Watch the full event recording⬇ or read the recap below.

I'm very happy to be here. My name's Greo Belgers. To give a little bit of background of me, I started my studies with chemistry, then I finished with art school, started an advertising agency, and logically I'm now working at a bank.

I started working for Triodos Bank in 2008, when the credit crisis was in full force, while I was at an advertising agency. Then, after six years of very close cooperation and brand building, I decided to help Triodos Bank even more and put all my focus on the company.

We're here at Patagonia. I think that's very clear. They have something you can hold. When you look at Patagonia it's about outdoor clothing and gear, or Alex you can probably correct me here because it's about much more than that, but that is the product side.

how do you help people understand what ethical banking is?

I thought let's first explain what the product of Triodos Bank is, and that's quite philosophical. Triodos Bank is about the transformative power of money. Money in itself, that's nothing. It's just an agreement between each other. There's some emotion inside. It can create greed. It can create trust. It can be hungry for more. It can be anything. Money in itself is neutral, it's nothing. The moment you spend it, or you invest it, or you give it away, then the real power starts. It can move into a direction where it can make influence for the good or for the bad, for the quality of the planet, for humanity, for you and for me.

This is something in branding we always try to express, and we do it in many, many different ways. We want to get people understand the power and the influence on money, and that the power is in your hands.

In one of the campaigns, "How do you become truly wealthy?" We traveled all over the world. We went to Eskimo on the North Pole, and ask him, what is money? Now, that was funny answer we got because he said, "I can talk about seal skins, but of my money, I know nothing." Then I learned that seal skin was their money, because they use it for trade.

We also went to Douglas Rushkoff, he's a writer for the New York Times. He very nicely explains a little bit about the death of money, and I made a clip, extract of it to listen to him for 40 seconds, to open you up a little bit what money is.

This is a campaign from 2016. Believe me, we just broadcast films like this on televisions and probably half of the Netherlands, because that would be for the Netherlands, were like, "What was this?" Because it goes on and on about fixing money. That's one of the things that's a little bit, we struggle with, we are that elite bank, right?

We became very elite, very philosophical. We can go a little bit deeper in talking about all kinds of the meaning behind money. That's one of our pitfalls.

These are not the founders. This is John Lennon and Yoko Ono. They are in the Hilton in Amsterdam, 1969. Hair peace, bed peace, great, famous picture. It was at that time that Triodos Bank was founded, and because there was a need in society for more freedom, more equality, and more brotherhood. John Lennon and Yoko Ono tried to address it with their sit-in and a bed-In. It was the undercurrent, in society present everywhere, people really wanted to get loose from the sophistication of the '50s, and the second World War. The new energy was going.

These hippies, those are the founders of Triodos Bank. They have less hair, but they have heart. Said, "What can we do to make this transition possible? How can we put money into that need for more brotherhood, equality, and all that kind of fellowship in society?" The good thing about those four is also they really had this idea and that's where it started. Only one was a banker. The rest are not from a bank.

They said we're going to look who needs money in society for positive change. Where can we put that money into action for positive change? And so, in 1971, Triodos Foundation was started. It became very successful quickly and then in 1980 Triodos became a bank because they applied for a banking license. From there we could start building our bank activities to have even more impact that we put in the foundation.

The difference between Triodos bank and all other banks is that every bank looks at what's the risk, what's the return when they want to loan the money. They loan money to entrepreneurs who build things and do things in society, who influence our living. We look at what's the risk of this loan, then we look what's the possible return from this loan, and then the third one that's probably even more important for us, what's the impact? Then we make decisions that other banks don't or we don't make the decision that other banks do.

Now we are quite big, however. I mean, it's a lot of money at 50 billion assets. That's a lot of money, however in banking that's nothing. It's really, really we are really small. We operate in six countries: The U.K, Netherlands, Germany, Belgium, France, and then Spain. Apart from Triodos Bank, we also have Triodos Investment Management where we produce funds and also distribute funds. Of course from the same idea and with the same characteristics and qualities of our banking product and that's all over the Netherlands.

We are transparent about what we do with the money so it starts with one Euro that goes in, which is one Euro that goes out. People give use money and we give that money to other people who we think are going to do something positive with it. Every we loan we give, all the money that we put out there is physical on Google Maps. For example here, it's going to Spain. You see all those Google pointers and if you go even deeper, this is one hundred kilometer above and you look at it and you see there's a solar plant we are investing in and making possible.

The beautiful thing about this is of course transparency but also, each Google pointer has a very very emotional story behind it. All those stories, they are really fantastic. I want to share one of those stories and then we go back to the brand. Let's go to Barra. Up in Scotland there's a very very small island. It's called Barra. This is the main city and only city in Barra. I think 40 people live there. This is the airport of Barra. Once a month an airplane can land, only low tide because it lands on the beach. They came to us and they want a loan. They wanted to have money, and they wanted to have loan to set windmill and wind energy. We made a campaign about that client because it shows what risk, return, and impact is in a very emotional touchy way, I think. It's a beautiful story. A woman from the BBC said, "I'm going to film it for you," and she made this clip which we then used in the U.K for our advertising.

I think that's a very good example of what a windmill is for the community there and it's essence. It's really that we have a future and a sense of self believe, which I think this is just wonderful. This is great. It's a windmill that's providing clean energy not only for Barra but also for the islands around it and it gives the community a reason to exist on that island.

what is The Triodos bank brand strategy?

What strategy do we follow with our brand?

We call our branding ‘Positive Footprints’ because what we try to do in communication and marketing is what we also do in our business. It's our mission. That means that we will never do push messaging or push marketing, it will always be we want to give something in the marketing.

That can be inspiration, it can be a useful service, it can be a great event that benefits a lot of people, but we will never talk about ourselves.

We will never talk about products.

We will always try to help people understand the role you play in the quality of life we are having with each other, we all have and endorsing you somehow to take action or do things or get inspired.

Sometimes, it's just the thing that you think, yeah, it does count what I'm doing. I'm going talk you through four steps with which we always use in our branding and advertising. Sometimes very successfully, sometimes not so successfully. From the outside, if you only look at the flashing lure it all looks very clean and beautiful. Whereas there's a big struggle behind it. It's not easy, it's every year again we are very afraid with the plans we are going to do.

How Greo built the Triodos Bank bank step by step

step 1: Start with a great payoff

We started with making a new payoff called Follow Your Heart, Use Your Head Triodos Bank. This is really what's all about. The tagline already tries to inspire and motivate you to do what's right. Start with follow your heart and then use your head. If you added to it, you grow into more of the action part, you could get if you look at your body, it's your heart, head, and then your hands. Where you start doing things that's continuing on the problem. We really also liked to write it as a sum of the first one.

step 2: Build brand recognition

When we started six or seven years ago nobody knew Triodos. It was the best-kept banking secret in the Netherlands, you could say. When you ask people if they could name a bank only three percent of the people named us, and usually that were the people that were very rooted in the 60s and 70s, who were very activist.

The top line here is what we do: lead fearlessly. Lead: we try to be a compass for people. We also think that brands should be a compass for people. The politics is a coward in those kinds of things. Institutions can have a big role here. Then the second word: fearless. We take a lot of risk in our brand. Yeah, that worked very very well.

But not always.

how do you create campaigns that people connect with?

rule 1: we always flip the script. an example is seeing The financial crisis as A time of hope

What we always do is our campaigns always react on the typecast. We always point out something that is happening in your life and you feel it as an undercurrent or a certain pressure out there. We try to bring new perspectives to show that there's more to it than you think.

In doing that, we try to educate people and empower people, give them a good feeling. Not like a good feeling with smiling people, but really endorses people and helps them do certain things.

I have an example here. It was in 2012 so it's already quite old. When we look at the context of the time, the credit crisis started in 2008. Last week we just celebrated ten year credit crisis, or 'celebrate'. Still a disaster. In those days, this was scary what happened. Go back to those days: Greece was falling out of the Euro. We didn't even know if the Euro would exist anymore. Also, almost all the banks in the Netherlands were nationalized. All over Europe there was this dark depression, and when you look at the period from an economic perspective it was very difficult.

People were losing jobs, a lot of companies were going bankrupt. The consumer trends was going down year after year after year. The investments was zero. Consumer purchase power was going down every quarter. The potent sentiment, I mean, it was really a depression. Europe seems to have come to a halt. For the Netherlands, for example, you are allowed to have a deficit of three percent, but we already had four or five percent. It made everybody very very nervous. In those times every week every newspaper and the media were talking about, "Are we growing yet? Are we growing more into a recession?" Of course, we were more into a recession.

It was the only talk of the time. We thought, yeah, wait a second. We are in a much better place if you really look at it. We said let's make a film, where we hardly have the budget for it, but luckily we found a filmmaker who was willing to help here. We made a film and then we had no money to broadcast it anymore. That was a very clever media strategy.

We made a film and then we said, "Okay, we're going to broadcast it once, but we're going to do it on each network." When people were sitting at the television and they thought advertising, I have to switch channels. The same, the same, the same, the same.

That was quite clever because we never broadcasted it in 2012 after that, and people started talking about this film and also engaging with the film and sending it to each other. In social media, suddenly this film boomed. Let's have a look at what our message is.

Well, in dark times it's a beautiful message it seems, right?

When we saw that social started to move this film, we then decided, okay, let's add some extra money and do a rerun on television. Then almost until today, not anymore until last year it popped up. People still were talking about it. I think you can feel it, also, this is really from our initial idea and our passion and drive to want to change something in the world. That's what I mean with being fearless. All my peers said, "Are you out of your mind? This is a disaster. You're not even selling a product. When I see this commercial, what should I do?" And we said, "Triodos bank never made a commercial. Now we made a commercial of 90 seconds, broadcast on all public channels at the same time, and it brought ... it did a good job."

The second rule: We target the culture creative

Culture Creative is a new segment of people disrupting the States. Where Paul Ryan was asked to investigate for the Democrats, why is it that every four years the Republicans or the Democrats are winning in America and how does that work? He described, "Roughly, there are three types of people. You have the modernists, they are open from new ideas. They look more from a global perspective. You have the traditionalist, they are all about family values and probably hunting and eating meat and all that kind of things. And then you have the culture creative."

Those are not creative or cultural people. The name sounds that, culture creative. What he meant is, a group of people who create their own culture. They were very hard to pinpoint, but they discovered that they can be old, they can be young, they can be rich, they can be highly educated, they are all present in that group. They have one commonality, and that is values. The values they share are exactly the values of Triodos Bank. They are worldwide our target audience.

There are quite a lot of culture creatives. If you look at here, Netherlands, Belgium, U.K, Spain, Germany and France, we research how many of those culture creatives are in those countries. You see that in the Netherlands and the U.K there are roughly 25%. I thought when we started to research that we were top in Europe but we weren't. Then, if you look at Germany, wow, almost 40% and when you think of it, it's not a surprise. Something big like that happens in Germany. They are very much into the values of Triodos Bank and culture creatives.

The last rule is, I've already mentioned this one, we don't talk about our products. Boring. More interesting is the mission, what do we stand for, what do we want to achieve in society. We are so passionate about this that we make mistakes.

One of the mistakes is that we decide on national television to boil a frog. Believe me, never ever boil a frog on national television. We did it and the reason was because the message of the boiling frog was very needed and also very urgent. We wanted to say to people, because we were to society and many people saying, "Well, doesn't matter what they do, we are going down, it's too late, not possible, do you know the story of the boiling frog when you put it to heat and, yeah, I know the story, we're all going to die."

We said, "But that story is not even true." So we made campaign about it.

Also, a lot of organizations started copying our style, our turn of words. I thought, hey, this is our campaign? No, it was an energy company. Hey, another one. Oh no, it's some other brand. We thought, we need different, distinct voice. Let's experiment, also about being fearless. Let's experiment with a totally different look and feel and let's boil a frog.

We thought let's put more suspense and make the noise under it and the heartbeat. We had to stop it because there were complaints from the public. But the footage was not real. Has anybody seen Star Wars, that's what we did here. It's all fake, this is editing, what you see here. We thought people would understand that. Then they said to us, "Yeah, but you give people an idea, they are going to start boiling frogs." We said, "That's not a good idea, we don't want that."

This is also, you know, paradoxical, you really want that message out there. We used the stage to inspire people and to help people get into a certain direction. When I see it now, and not with this history, I go: how blind can we be? We were very blind, we thought this was a great idea.

how do you compete with conventional banks that are jumping on the ethical banking trend?

A lot of new players are stepping in thinking, hey, that's an interesting market. We want our share there. Making us less distinct. That's complicated, on the other hand, more people are interested in it. Hey, that's good thing. I see a balance there.

It's a challenge for the story telling. We have to do a good job all the time and also, people are not stupid. When I saw the campaign of the other bank I looked in social media. I was curious, do people like it, what do they think about it. I saw some critical comments. Quite a lot, where people said, "Yeah, yeah." It's not my comment, but people said, "First you cause problem, and now you say you're going to solve it," for example. How true and honest this sort of thing?

Culture creative: we are very lucky that that is our target audience. They are very interested in the story behind something. They want to have more information. They are also known for ‘don't tell me, I will find out myself’. They investigate things. They will find out the difference between one bank and Triodos Bank on their own.  

That's it.

We always want to be a movement of change that people feel connected to and inspired by and also part of. I love it when it really happened to me once that I paid at the gas station with a Triodos card and a student there said, "Ah, Triodos. I'm a member, too." And I was like, "A member of paying? That's a good idea." This is what our brand is all about. Thanks.

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