Being Relevant Can Require Being Unfashionable

This NRO post by Mark Steyn made me think of the implications for marketing, especially marketing a non-profit. I've pasted the whole thing for context and have bolded the parts that I'm particularly thinking of, in terms of marketing/positioning/messaging:

Live Free or Die! [Mark Steyn]
Two hundred years ago -- July 31, 1809 -- General Stark wrote the words that are now New Hampshire's state motto.

As an immigrant to the Granite State, I was born in a jurisdiction whose license plates bear the stirring exhortation "Yours to discover," so I certainly appreciate getting to drive around with John Stark's battle cry on my rig. I reflected a little on the motto in this speech at Hillsdale College. Its lesson for our time is this:

It's a bald statement of the reality of our lives in the prosperous West. You can live as free men, but, if you choose not to, your society will die.

Death doesn't always come in one fell blow. Sometimes freedom dies in a thousand cuts all but imperceptible but ultimately fatal.

As to New Hampshire, a couple of years back some executive dingbat paid a gazillion dollars to some marketing agency to come up with a tourist slogan. What do you get for that kind of expenditure? Six words: "You're going to love it here!"

They put it on a sign on I-93 as you cross over from Massachusetts. There was a huge objection to this seven-figure insipid generic pap, and within weeks it had been replaced with "Live free or die!" I don't know whether the state's copyright on "You're going to love it here!", but it's a fine slogan for Obamatopia.
Posted at 11:52 AM

“Live Free Or Die” is hardly politically correct. It is hardly the public sense of the general populace as expressed via the media. You would never see a Newsweek cover or editorial that says anything close to Live Free Or Die. It’s too “red state” in its sentiment (even though NH isn’t a red state). Too patriotic. It smacks of American exceptionalism which is, dahhhhling, oh so gauche. Horribly unfashionable.

“You’re going to love it here” is far more conventional, “winsome” and the like. It more feels like the general sense, sentiment and trajectory of the culture.

But the problem is that it’s stupid, vapid, undifferentiated. It’s nonsense.

The consumer demand, as it turns out, is for the unfashionable, gauche, retro-patriotic “Live Free Or Die”. This centuries old battle cry is in demand because it captures the imagination. It inspires. It’s aspirational.

The positioning, branding and advertising pros came up with the stupid motto. By aligning with the sense of things, the cultural vibe.

There’s no singular, clear lesson in all of this, though there are surely some. It should certainly cause us to ask the question “What makes us unique? … what about us captures consumer imagination? …. Inspires them? … Drives them to act?”