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This paper aims to understand the attitudes of young Pacific Island adults towards financial products such as debt and money and explore the cultural elements influencing the financial consumption amongst Pacific Island adults.

Hermeneutic phenomenology has been used to explore and gain insights into the experiences, thought processes, values and aspirations of young Pacific Island adults with regard to their consumption of financial products.

The findings identify culture as an influential factor in shaping the participants’ attitudes and financial consumption behaviour. Culture not only enabled the individuals to internalize their values, norms and beliefs but also shaped their way of thinking through the effect of communications.

Communication element within culture is identified as an influential factor in shaping the participants’ attitudes and financial consumption behaviour offering an important insight that social marketers should be aware of and be prepared to address when developing their financial educational programs or any other behavioural change interventions.

We aim to explore how the COVID-19 crisis has initiated entrepreneurship amongst micro-scale businesses in the notably vulnerable street food industry. We highlight Malaysian street food vendors’ remarkable resilience as they evolved from informal enterprises into innovative entrepreneurs during the pandemic. This involves comprehending the pandemic’s impact and the coping strategies these businesses adopt to endure, evolve and thrive.

We carried out a semi-structured interview with 20 street food vendors in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. By using a qualitative approach and integrating theories on appraisal, resource management and self-regulated activities, this paper explores vendors’ experiences on their journey towards becoming entrepreneurs regardless of limited resources.

Despite the disruption, COVID-19 offers a crucial wake-up call even for micro-scale businesses. We discover the capability of street food vendors to outlast crisis through transformation into individuals with an entrepreneurial mindset. They adapted by diversifying their offerings and implementing new strategies like digital marketing and e-commerce. We also emphasise the contribution of family members in providing psychosocial support and navigating business challenges as an advantage of employing a highly self-efficacious individual within the group. This transformation not only ensures the survival of micro-scale enterprises but also underscores their potential to thrive and innovate, even in the face of adversity.

This paper extends the existing literature on street vending by integrating the appraisal theory of emotion, resource-based view theory and self-efficacy theory to explore how street food vendors with limited resources have managed to transform the informal business nature into an entrepreneurial environment under the pressure of a crisis.

The purpose of this paper is to identify the potential business opportunities for Middle Eastern entrepreneurs by understanding the Malaysian Muslim’s ways of experiencing and realising value of products originating from Middle Eastern countries.

Phenomenography approach has been used to identify the variations among the Muslim consumers’ ways of experiencing Middle Eastern products.

The authors reported that Muslim consumers considered the country of origin as an important cue that affects their knowing, understanding, judging and acting on products originating from Middle Eastern countries.

Understanding developed from the Malaysian Muslim consumers enabled authors to suggest business opportunities for Middle Eastern entrepreneurs to enter and expand their operations in other leading Islamic countries.