Dacia does the right thing

This is a post about reconsidering.
To start off, I have always disliked Dacia (the car for Romanians :-). I thought it was a badly named, badly made, badly promoted product bought only for the wrong reasons namely for price, low price.
Today I was invited to an event which continues in the series that Dacia has been implementing to promote its new take on the brand and I went. The event gathered a bunch of bloggers, some identity and comms people and some journalists. It was meant to be a 2.0 reveal of the new Dacia logo, identity and also of the strategy for the years to come.
The new logo
It has been widely mocked for resembling a bottle opener, although on the spur of the moment I must admit it reminds me of a much advertised Durex vibrating ring. BUT, that is not the point. Shapes are always reminiscent of other shapes because, unlike words, they are taken in holistically (that is why we recognize the H without a leg instantly in the well known test). So, the argument that it resembles random shapes is immaterial to me. What matters is that I find the logo speaks to some of the innate Dacia values (very much unlike the new identity statement as we shall later see) of sturdiness, bulky reliability and rough simplicity. Dacia is not a sophisticated car not should it claim to be one. According to what the company reps said the car is still bought because of its low low price for quality ratio, therefore the logo serves to reinforce some basic features which justify the "frugal" pricing :-)
The brand identity
As stated in this doc (ro only sorry people and so are most of the links) the new brand is generous and ingenious. Generous - through its interior and ingenious through great price4 quality solutions. The company rep also mentioned some other reasons for this positioning which, to tell you the truth, seemed tacked on and made no sense in the context. As I said before, I find the logo a true incarnation of what the product and the brand is. The talk behind it seems, for the generous part, a bit too inspirational and for the ingenious part a bit overpromising. I think that a dose of sincerity may have served the brand platform better. The good thing is that no one will ever hear the platform and if the agency working Dacia knows how to avoid BS talk this may even work.
The product
I am not the right one to talk about this although if it is as large as I expect it, it is sturdy enough to make a point to the brand and, hopefully, it will not come with too many a sophisticated add ons. This should not be a fancy car.
The initiative
Finally, I feel I need to underline how much I appreciate the chances Dacia is taking with its comms. After the much discussed Kiss Dacia blog campaign, this 2.0 manner of opening up to a community of opinion leaders, which is less acknowledged than it should, signals one truly amazing thing: that someone in that company has an open mind. I find this noteworthy especially coming from a formerly communist and monopolistic brand whose appetite for change was slim in the years following the revolution.

So, weirdly enough, this is a post about a decent job Dacia is doing, maybe not with the product yet and not with the talk behind the new logo either, but at least with the approach to comms and the design of its frontpiece :-)
read some more about the same from other fellow bloggers attending here and here
Pics courtesy of zoso

LATER EDIT: just read some more about the company's idea behind the logo. It seems it is meant to make the brand more attractive to women and young people. Interestingly enough this fits little with the look of the logo which is, true, more rounded, but at the same time too sturdy to work for a woman. As to the younger generation, I am assuming that the 'ingenious' brand attribute, meaning price for quality ratio, will be the clencher. Somehow things are not really tying in together.