Meaning-transfer model
Your stuff isn't yours. It's borrowed meaning from culture, and you pay rent in identity.
Grounded in the research on https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grant_McCracken
What it actually is
The meaning-transfer model says the meaning of your stuff doesn't live in the stuff. It's on loan. Anthropologist Grant McCracken laid it out in 1986 (Journal of Consumer Research) and his book Culture and Consumption: cultural meaning is constantly moving between three locations. The culturally constituted world (what your society codes as cool, masculine, rich, rebellious), the consumer good itself, and you. A Rolex is not intrinsically status. Society loaded status into it, the good carries it, and you absorb it by wearing it. Nothing means anything until culture says so.
Stage one: world to good
Meaning moves from culture into the product through two engines. Advertising is the obvious one: ad creatives literally splice a cultural meaning (freedom, sex, belonging) next to the object until your brain fuses them. The second is the fashion system, the slower machine of magazines, designers, influencers, and opinion leaders that decides what black means this year. McCracken pulled this framework straight from anthropology, not marketing fluff. The good doesn't earn its meaning. It gets assigned one by people who control the codes.