The factors influence on “Buy Muslim First” (BMF) campaign purchasing behaviour among Malaysian polytechnic students

The launch of the “Buy Muslim First” (BMF) campaign has received a lot of positive and negative reactions among Malaysians especially for Muslim consumers. In order to look at this matter more closely, a study was conducted to discover the purchasing behaviour that prioritise purchasing Muslim products among consumers. This purchasing behaviour also known as BMF purchasing behaviour. Therefore, the study's intentions are to examine factors that may influence the BMF purchasing behaviour among Malaysian polytechnic students, including knowledge of BMF campaign, religiosity, subjective norms and perceived behavioural control. The theoretical framework was developed based on the Theory of Planned Behaviour (TPB) in which knowledge of BMF campaigns and religiosity were added as new variables in an attempt to predict BMF purchasing behaviour. The data used for this study were collected from 367 respondents among students for all semesters of the Malaysian Polytechnic Department of Commerce in the northern region. Hypothesis testing was developed to examine whether there was a significant relationship between the variables involved. All data were analysed using IBM SPSS Statistics version 22. The results showed that knowledge of BMF campaign, religiosity, subjective norms and perceived behavioural control was significantly associated with BMF purchasing behaviour among Malaysian polytechnic students. Further analysis found that knowledge of BMF campaign, subjective norms and perceived behavioural control positively influenced BMF purchasing behaviour among Malaysian polytechnic students. However, one variable was found to be unrelated to the model in this study, namely religiosity. The results of this preliminary study positively support the launched BMF campaign. This study shows that the Malaysian community in particular the Muslim community needs to focus on significant variables in cultivating the purchasing behaviour that prioritizes Muslim products in everyday life.