Fall of Europes Iron Curtain Opens Education and Career Path for Fowler Professor

Growing up in communist Eastern Europe, Claudiu Dimofte was always curious about the Western World. “Having grown up behind the Iron Curtain, the U.S. held a special attraction for most young Romanians at the time,” he said. “I also had a desire to challenge myself in the most competitive and high-performing graduate education system in the world.”

Claudiu Dimofte, Ph.D., Professor, Marketing Department

Dimofte, now a marketing professor at the Fowler College of Business at San Diego State University, grew up in Timisoara, Romania. Timisoara is famous for being the starting point of Romania’s anti-communist uprising in December 1989, which ignited only a month after the fall of Germany’s Berlin Wall. 

After earning his bachelor’s degree in economics from Timisoara’s West University in 1996, Dimofte turned his goal into a reality. He moved to the U.S. to enroll at the University of South Carolina and earn his MBA with a specialization in international business. Shortly thereafter, he found himself behind a desk in corporate America, but soon found it wasn’t to his liking, as he “still enjoyed learning.”

With that in mind, Dimofte turned to several professors at the University of South Carolina for advice and they persuaded him to pursue a Ph.D. Their insights also influenced him to change his course of study. He followed their advice and enrolled at the University of Washington where he earned his Ph.D. in marketing in 2004. 

After graduating, Dimofte continued his enjoyment of learning through a career in academics. He spent seven years teaching and researching consumer psychology and corporate branding at Georgetown University before moving back to the West Coast to become an SDSU faculty member in 2011. He said he chose to come to the Fowler College of Business because it has “a department culture that nurtures personal relationships and growth, as well as an unbeatable location.” 

Since coming to SDSU, Dimofte has solidified his place as an expert in consumer psychology and branding issues by researching and teaching about topics such as marketing research, advertising and product packaging. 

Dimofte has been honored with a Fowler College of Business Outstanding Faculty Award – Research, Teaching and Service (2014), a Teaching Excellence Award (2019) and has been twice recognized as the “Most Influential Professor” for the top MBA graduate (2014 and 2021).

This expertise earned him the attention of several local public health experts who were leading a team of researchers from the University of California at San Diego, California State University San Marcos, and San Diego County Public Health Services. The researchers were investigating whether graphic images printed on cigarette packages would provide smokers with the incentive to quit. Dimofte, who studied the impact of visual cues on consumers for some time, was asked to join the team to provide the analytical marketing analysis component of the study which researched the behavior of smokers when they saw these labels each time they reached for a cigarette. 

In their recently published research, Dimofte and the other researchers found that even with graphic images of health issues associated with cigarette use, smokers reported that they increasingly thought about quitting, but they did not do so. “This is in line with previous research which indicates that intentions to change are rarely sufficient to alter addictive behavior,” he said. “In summary, graphic warning labels alone are not sufficient to induce cessation among smokers who are not ready to quit.”

This study has had a significant impact on Dimofte and public health has since become an important research area for him. “I discovered that the topic was both interesting and in-line with much of my own consumer psychology work that focuses on how marketing efforts impact consumer welfare,” he said. “The findings have been interesting and speak to the enduring power of corporate marketing.” 

While Dimofte enjoys his research work, he says he finds that “interactions with students are the most rewarding and enriching part” of his job. “It is gratifying to see former students who find their transition to the business world facilitated and influenced by my work in the classroom,” he said.

As for his own life influence, Dimofte credits his father as having a significant impact. “My father was a CPA and had a stellar reputation for excellence and ethics in his work, which was not a trivial accomplishment in Romania,” he said. “He has always challenged me to discover and pursue a professional path of which I can be proud.”

This research was supported by a grant from the National Cancer Institute (Grant Number: R01 CA190347 and Grant Number RO1 CA234539) and by the Tobacco-Related Disease Research Program (Grant Number: 28DT-0005).   

The funders had no role in either the design or conduct of this study or in the decision to submit for publication.