Predicting Muslim Consumers’ Intention Towards Goat Milk Purchasing Behaviour In Malaysia

Abstract

Goat milk is one of the prophetic foods and starting to be well known among Malaysian especially by Muslim due to following Prophet Muhammad (PBUH) sunnah. Muslim in Malaysia is the majority population and changing of healthy lifestyle by consuming healthy foods such as goat milk have made the market grow steadily. Therefore, this study aims to investigate Muslim consumer intention toward goat milk purchasing behaviour in Malaysia by extent Theory of Planned Behaviour (TPB). The study employed mixed-methodology which were qualitative (focus group discussion (FGD); in-depth interviews) and quantitative (survey questionnaire). In qualitative study, a total of 10 individuals who regularly purchase goat milk were gathered into two FGD sessions and three experts were interviewed to support the data. Meanwhile, 420 usable questionnaires were collected in the quantitative study. Data were ran using Statistical Package for the Social Sciences (SPSS) version 24.0 and Partial Least Square-Structural Equation Modelling (PLS-SEM) to demonstrate the model. There were two phases of qualitative study findings. In the first phase, findings from FGD (health, nutrition, religion, taste and price) were used to add in the extension of the TPB model and hypothesis of this study. Meanwhile, in the second phase, data gathered from FGD and in-depth interviews were used to support the findings of the quantitative study. To elaborate, the analysis showed that seven factors namely attitude (p=0.05), subjective norm (p=0.00), health (p=0.017), nutrition (p=0.017), religion (p=0.004), taste (p=0.002) and price (p=0.03), have significant impact (p=0.05) on Muslim consumer intention toward goat milk purchasing behaviour. Moreover, the results demonstrated that intention (p=0.00) significantly affects purchasing behaviour of goat milk. Furthermore, practical implications were given for government and business sectors to develop more effective strategies to encourage Muslim consumers to make daily goat milk purchasing behaviour. The findings from this study also contributed to improve the understanding of the intention of Muslim consumers towards goat milk purchasing behaviour, which could play a major role towards sustainable consumption of healthy products. In addition, this study supports the Malaysian government plan for the National Plan of Action for Nutrition of Malaysia III (2016-2025) on promoting healthy lifestyles through goat milk purchasing which is known to be beneficial to health with various nutritious contents.