A 99-year-old gets her first computer – an iPad.

She’s an avid reader and has glaucoma so this enables her to read again. She also writes poems.

Notice how she’s all business and not flustered when sitting down with the computer for the first time as her daughters stand around in the background. I love how she asks “Where’s the comma?” at the 1:10 mark:

Today we will discuss the power of the Breakfast Club story and how to add Breakfast Club moments to your business.

The movie came out in 1985 and is about five high school kids who have to spend a Saturday in detention together.

On the surface, the kids each fit a certain stereotype and seem very different from each other: a criminal, athlete, princess, basket case and brain.

The movie made such a powerful impact on us Gen Xers at the time because the movie understood us. It perfectly portrayed what high school life was like.

If you’ve never seen the movie, click here to watch a trailer.

It’s almost impossible to discuss the movie without asking, “Which Breakfast Club character were you in high school?”

For the record, I was a mix of Anthony Michael Hall (brain/dork) and Ally Sheedy (basket case) in high school.

In addition to making us feel understood, the movie helped us understand others.

There are many moments throughout the movie where the characters let down their guard and talk about the pain beneath their facades. One even felt empathy toward Bender, the loser/criminal character, when he showed everyone the cigar burn on his arm from his father.

The movie also me feel empathy toward the bullies I knew in high school.

At the end of the movie, the brain character writes an essay in which he says that all five of them realized, at the end of the detention, that all of them are a combination of the princess, criminal, brain, athlete and basket case. They are all more alike than they ever would have guessed.

Or as the Emilio Estevez character said, “We’re all pretty bizarre. Some of us are just better at hiding it.”

So what does this have to do with your online business?

The relationship the Breakfast Club characters were able to develop with each other on that day never could have been planned.

Like all such experiences, it happened spontaneously.

Obviously you can’t get your clients and prospects together in a detention hall and spend a day listening to them.

But when your clients and prospects spontaneously contact you through email and social media, they will sometimes reveal things to you that you never would have thought to ask yourself.

Quite often what they will say to you has nothing to do with you or your product and sometimes it will be negative.

Instead of dismissing what they say, you should treat it like a Breakfast Club moment.  The more you show  you understand them and have empathy, the more effective your marketing campaigns and product development will be.

For more about that I suggest you read my other posts about listening.

Finally, when writing email copy, include occasional Breakfast Club moments of your own, where you are transparent and tell a story about yourself and connect with your prospects on a human level.

No one wants to read one sales pitch after another and constant chest-thumping. How-to information is useful but too much of it is just makes people feel overwhelmed, especially if it’s not immediately applicable to them.

Like Claire in the Breakfast club, who overcame her embarrassment and showed them all her unique way of putting on lipstick, let them see a different side of you sometimes.

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Your next product idea (or even a new career) might come out of it:

This quote comes from Jessica Hische, who is a young designer well known for her hand lettering.

As she explains in this short video, she noticed she would work on graphic design while procrastinating from doing art, so she ended up becoming a designer instead of a painter or sculptor.

And she ended up including hand lettering as one of her specialties because she found herself doing hand lettering while procrastinating from a graphic design project.

If you take a look at her work you’ll see that procrastination paid off for her.

So instead of beating yourself up for being unproductive while you procrastinate, pay attention to it instead. Maybe you’ll get inspiration.

Check out this video of a baseball playing doing a flip over a catcher to avoid getting tagged:

Of course after watching this I wasn’t content… I wanted to know the player’s story.

Does he have a gymnastics background? Did he hurt himself? What was going through his mind before deciding to do the flip? Where did he grow up?

He’s an ordinary player who plays for a team with a losing record, yet he managed to do something extraordinary. This play happened two days ago and the video has more than a million views already.

The marketing (and life) lesson here is pretty obvious. If it seems for all the world like you’re going to get called out, there’s probably a way you can flip over the catcher too, so to speak.

And when you do, be ready with your story. Nothing makes people want to hear your story more than when you do something remarkable.

If you want more details about this baseball player’s story, click here.

In email copy, no paragraph should be longer than two sentences. In sales letters, no longer than 4-5 sentences. Follow each long paragraph with a short one.

Your white space is as important as your text.

This video beautifully demonstrates the importance of showing, not telling, when writing copy.

Notice how instead of telling the people to be compassionate, he makes them feel compassionate instead.

And as a short copy specialist, I appreciate the pithiness of the copy on this sign:

I see I’ve been getting hits to this website for the search phrase “Mother’s Day subject lines.”

Whoa, it’s almost that time of year already.

Anyone in any niche can send out an email that ties in with Mother’s Day.

You don’t have to sell greeting cards, flowers or chick-knacks to acknowledge Mother’s Day in your marketing.

Even if you’re in the internet marketing niche, surely you can think of a lesson you learned from your mom you can tell as a story and then promote a product at the end.

Barbara Corcoran wrote an entire business book based on the lessons she learned from her mom that she has used in building her billion dollar real estate business in New York.

Each chapter title is a lesson she learned from her mother and they make for good email subject line inspiration. Here are a few:

“If you don’t have big breasts, put ribbons on your pigtails.”

“It’s your game, make your own rules.”

“Go play outside.”

“Moms can’t quit.”

“Jumping out the window will either make you an ass or a hero.”

If you’re a retailer who sells products that would be of interest to women on Mother’s Day, you can’t ever go wrong with subject lines that announce a discount and encourage women to buy something for themselves for Mother’s Day. As a mother I’ve fallen for a subject line like that a time or two.

As they come in, I’ll post Mother’s Day subject lines that arrive in my inbox (the ones I think are acceptable, that is. Too many of them are of the “Mother’s Day Deals” variety). If you have any you’d like to share, feel free to post them in the comments:

Love Mom and Love to Save? Get 50% Off the Perfect Mother’s Day Gift! That one is from Barnes & Noble.

Send mom some love with these gifts from Bas Bleu

As expected, J. Peterman didn’t disappoint with their Mother’s Day subject line: Free 2nd Day Shipping – Grand (Dame) Finale. Click here to see the email.

As much as I like the internet I have to admit that real life would be kind of pathetic if we acted like the way so many people act online.

This fun comic is from This Modern World on Salon:

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Sometimes copywriters wonder how much they have contributed to the more negative aspects of internet marketing.

I’ve pondered that too from time to time and, specifically, I’ve wondered at times if I’m merely selling feelings instead of products.

There’s that great line from Don Draper (head of the creative department in a 1960s ad agency) in Mad Men where he says, “I sell products, not advertising.”

He wasn’t interested in just selling clients on slick marketing campaigns… he wanted to actually sell their products.

But like Don also says to one of his copywriters, “You are the product. You are feeling something. That’s what sells.”

So there’s no avoiding feelings in copy. The key is to avoid contributing to the never-ending festival of hype that only helps create Ralph Wolves instead of Sam Sheepdogs.

Also, I’ve taken encouragement from what Brian Eno said last year in an interview about how he works with U2 in the studio:

They feed on their own excitement… the point is to keep offering ladders that people can climb up to another place and then you can throw the ladder away afterwards, it doesn’t matter.”

So even if your product isn’t the greatest or most unique product out there, as long as it’s a ladder, then it’s OK, because ultimately it’s not your product itself that makes the difference but how it motivates customers to use their own strength to climb up to another place.