How psychological contracts motivate employer-brand patronage Yoshiko DeMotta 1 & Sankar Sen 2 # Springer Science+Business Media New York 2017 Abstract Research on employees’ purchase of their employer’ s product is scarce. In this paper, we investigate how psychological contracts will impact employees’ pur- chase motivations of their employer brand. Two studies examining real and imagined purchase behaviors show that employees with relational type of psychological contracts are more likely to purchase their employer brand than are employees with transactional type of psychological contracts. This is because the former type of psychological contracts will encourage both intrinsic and extrinsic motives to support the employer brand. Keywords Employee purchase behavior . Psychological contract . Motivation . Social influence . Internal marketing The extent to which employees voluntarily consume the products they make or sell is a reflection of both product attractiveness and employee engagement. While employees’ consumption of their employer’ s brand (i.e., employer-brand patronage) can be seen as a strong endorsement, their patronage of competitor brands can send a hazardous signal and hurt the company’ s reputation. Employees’ word-of-mouth about their employer’ s brands can influence broader customer segments, possibly even more so than public relations or advertising (Fradin 2013). At the same time, employees can be important customers for a brand, generating significant revenues with minimal marketing costs (Fram and McCarthy 2003). Of course, there are practical reasons why employees Mark Lett DOI 10.1007/s11002-017-9426-5 * Yoshiko DeMotta ydemotta@fdu.edu 1 Silberman College of Business, Fairleigh Dickinson University, 285 Madison Avenue, Madison, NJ 07940, USA 2 Baruch College, City University of New York, One Bernard Baruch Way, B12-240, New York, NY 10010, USA