I like the idea of "Strategy 1," like RM Express.
For me, on the local level, I just try to connect how things are done in people's favorite shows/movies to how things are done in RM - and how other games cannot come close to modeling such actions. Just connect it to something they already like, to transfer the emotion. At a game-wide level this would be getting rights to a popular intellectual property, something ICE had in the past with MERP. Something like that would help to bring in players, but which one?