The relational–experiential market system: an emergent framework for marketing strategy in fashion-related small retail businesses

This study introduces the Relational-Experiential Market System (REMS), explaining how fashion-related retailers develop marketing strategies in digitally mediated, community-centered, resource-constrained settings. Thematic analysis of interviews with 12 female owners in one Midwestern U.S. state identified five interdependent dimensions: Relational Capital, Experiential Value, Community Embeddedness, Digital Ecosystem Leverage, and Purpose Alignment. Rather than discrete marketing actions, these dimensions form a reinforcing system through which local relationships, founder identity, and digital coordination substitute for financial and structural capital. Findings also reveal conditional tensions involving intimacy's limited scalability, competitive risks in local collaboration, transactional versus experiential uses of digital channels, and dependence on founders’ visibility. REMS offers resource-sensitive guidance for retailers and business-support organisations while advancing a testable framework for future longitudinal and mixed-method research. Because the qualitative sample is regionally and demographically concentrated, the findings support conceptual transferability rather than statistical generalizability pending validation across ownership groups, regions, and retail subsectors.