Purpose is dead. Long live purpose.

I have a love-hate relationship with the word purpose. For the uninitiated: purpose is the idea that you should capture your reason for being in a punchy one-liner about making a positive impact on people and society.

The love: companies hear society’s call for meaning and reinvent themselves—from money machines into makers of meaning. According to its purpose, Heineken does not merely brew beer; it brews a better world.

Volkswagen says its reason for being includes living in harmony with the environment, yet only a few years ago the European Court convicted it of replacing emissions-cheating software with more emissions-cheating software. Purpose, then.

I wholeheartedly agree that organizations need a social reason for being and should not exist solely to make more money for their shareholders.

The allergy: marketing’s systematic hollowing out of language. Marketing constantly looks for what people care about, then uses it to sell more. The underlying meaning is irrelevant, as long as it performs.

The result is that noble, scientifically grounded ideas gradually lose their meaning. Take identity: an idea so complex that philosophers, psychologists, sociologists, and communication scholars cannot agree on a single theory. That does not make it unworthy of inquiry. Those theories contain a great deal of meaning.

Flash forward. Today, a programmer or graphic designer supposedly no longer builds a website or designs a logo. Their services are given grander, more abstract names. We inflate work with language that simultaneously empties it out. We learn to recognize important subjects as bullshit and lose the words we need to discuss those subjects. What a waste. The same is true of purpose.

Companies such as Heineken, Volkswagen, and Unilever—not to mention the ad agency around the corner—have stripped the word of much of its original meaning. After roughly twenty years of purpose in business, I therefore declare it time for a new, uncontaminated word: one that can carry an honest message for a while, before advertising hollows that one out too.

But I also love the word purpose.The search for why people do what they do—and what they do it for.I hope that attention never disappears.Purpose is dead. Long live purpose.