This week, the cosmetics giant Maybelline New York debuted its first new tag line in more than three decades, an effort to modernize one of the best-known jingles in beauty marketing.
In a new advertisement for the brand, the pop star Miley Cyrus — variously lounging in a theater, on a sofa, in a bed and on a carpeted floor — waxes philosophic on the idea of possibility. She declares in a voice-over that “if you can dream it, you can create it.”
“I think of ‘maybe’ as all the doors being open,” she continues, adding, “‘Maybe’ is music, ‘maybe’ is creativity.”
Sure.
Then, instead of delivering the memorable “Maybe she’s born with it, maybe it’s Maybelline” slogan, she swerves: “Maybe. We’re born with it. Maybe. It’s Maybelline.”
In a statement, the company said that while the original 1991 tag line posed a question about one woman’s beauty, a shift in subject pronoun — from “she” to “we” — has broadened its scope “from one woman to all women.” And a single period (though really it’s a generous sprinkling of four periods) “transforms a question into a declaration of infinite possibility.”
To which social media responded with a communal head scratch. On Reddit, commenters wondered what, exactly, the newly free-standing maybes referred to. And do eight words really need four periods?
Some, on Instagram, wrote off the rebrand as corporate word salad. Others jokingly offered their own alternatives. “Maybe we are born with it. Maybe not. Maybelline,” Tracy Silagi, a freelance brand copywriter, suggested on LinkedIn. Another user, on TikTok, presented a more Shakespearean spin: “Maybe or not maybe, that is the Maybelline.”
Maybelline is hardly the first brand to attempt a pivot that doesn’t quite land with consumers, according to Jared Watson, an assistant professor of marketing at the N.Y.U. Stern School of Business. In 2010, for example, Gap redesigned its logo to remove the navy box and white serif lettering only to face such fierce criticism that it reverted to the original within days.
But much of the criticism in this case stemmed from a deeper unease: Is this, many wondered, just another example of a brand outsourcing work to artificial intelligence, leading, in this case, to the replacement of a memorable slogan with something so baffling that the ad campaign’s website includes an F.A.Q. page that seeks to clarify the definition of “maybe”?
While the 1991 slogan had wordplay and a singsong cadence to it, the new one is “clunky, right?” Watson said. “Just from a conversational perspective, it’s hard to say.” That awkwardness, he added, “leads us to make the inference that no human would write this.”
The new slogan is too short to run through A.I.-detection software, and Maybelline declined to comment on the record as to whether A.I. was used. But in the same way that em dashes became a giveaway for artificial intelligence (which then turned otherwise dash-agnostic humans into skeptics of the punctuation mark), excessive periods are also a robotic tell, said Ruby Thelot, a cyber-ethnographer and author of “In Defense of Being-On-Line.”
“When you read A.I. text, one of the things that you notice is the shortness of the sentences,” Thelot said.
To Silagi, the copy writer, the slogan gives a whiff of good old-fashioned human “critical overthinking.”
A.I., she added, “could never create something as overthought as this.”
