With the winter holidays approaching, many companies are gearing up to position their products as ideal gift options. In one such promotion that I saw, an airline was advertising their gift card offerings. However, the way they chose to write the text was a little bit baffling.

Instead of referring to it with normal words, e.g. the “Acme Airlines Gift Card”, they left out all the spaces. So, it looked more like “AcmeAirlinesGiftCard”. Yep, they turned an otherwise straightforward name into a jumbled up mess.

Obviously, taking out the spaces between words makes the resulting text harder to read. Dubious stylistic goals aside, this reduces the chance that prospective customers will understand the message and take the desired action. So if you’re tempted to remove the spaces from a product name just because it looks trendy, don’t forget to factor in all the missed opportunities that may result when customers can’t figure out what you’re talking about.