Picture a plain pair of boots. All they really do is keep your feet dry. Watch how a feeling from the culture gets stuck onto them by marketing, then rubs off onto you, though the boots never change.
The boots never changed what they do, they kept your feet dry the whole way through. Everything else was a feeling on the move: it started in the culture around us, marketing stuck it onto the boots, and buying and wearing them rubbed it off onto you (McCracken, 1986).
By the end the boots are not just something you own, they are a little piece of who you are, what researchers call the "extended self" (Belk, 1988). That is the heart of Consumer Culture Theory: the interesting thing about what we buy is rarely what it does, it is the meaning passing through it.
Worth remembering: this explains what our shopping means, not how much sells. Great for "what is going on here?", but you still need the number tools for "how big?" and "which lever?".