Peiying Gu: Expanding Global Marketing Impact

At a time when many brands struggle to translate growth across borders, Peiying Gu has built a career helping Asian brands enter the U.S. market not through hype, but through cultural trust, community, and disciplined strategy. After nearly a decade shaping brand narratives across China, the U.S., Japan, and Southeast Asia, she has established herself as a marketing leader who blends data, empathy, creativity, and cross-market insight into work that tends to drive measurable business impact. Her career spans television broadcasting, enterprise-level marketing strategy, and high-visibility event hosting, a trajectory that has given her an unusually human view of how brands communicate and how audiences form trust.

Peiying began her career at the Shanghai Media Group, where she served as an anchor and producer for “Stock Daily,” one of the network’s highest-profile financial programs. Her interviews with economists and industry leaders helped sharpen her ability to translate complex business issues into stories that resonated with real audiences. The experience gave her a deep appreciation for truth, accuracy, and narrative discipline, qualities that later shaped her approach to marketing strategy. In 2017, she became a co-founder of MASAHIKO Media, leading large-scale experiential campaigns, livestream productions, and regional go-to-market initiatives for global brands including Crocs, Nio, Dyson, Zimmermann, Philips, Jeacoo, and multiple automotive brands expanding into Southeast Asia and Europe. She led over 80 large-scale brand activations annually, spanning executive roundtables, influencer programs, and omnichannel storytelling, helping global brands localize trust and accelerate growth across Southeast Asia and Europe.

As the Founder of NEXTT Brand Advisors and the New York Director of the NEXTT Brand accelerator, Peiying is now building one of a small but growing number of U.S.–China cross-border brand ecosystems, designed to help Asian brands enter the American market with strategy, storytelling, and real community grounding.

Unlike traditional consulting firms that operate primarily through decks and reports, Peiying’s work is deeply embedded on the ground, combining strategy with physical spaces, community engagement, and real market testing in U.S. cities. She leads companies through market readiness diagnosis, brand positioning, U.S. go-to-market planning, creator ecosystems, retail activation, and partnership development across New York, Seattle, Los Angeles, and Shanghai.

At NEXTT Brand Advisors, Peiying advises CEOs and founders on U.S. market entry strategy, brand narrative development, investor-ready communication, and multi-city activation planning. Her consulting practice integrates data interpretation with cultural fluency, allowing her to translate local insights into actionable business strategy. She is known for giving brands a strategic spine, a clear truth, a disciplined operating rhythm, and a long-term growth architecture that aligns product, marketing, BD, and community.

As the lead of the NEXTT Brand Hub in Midtown Manhattan, she oversees a hybrid accelerator that combines a co-working showroom, event space, creator studio, and brand testing lab. The hub hosts community events, retail pop-ups, expert workshops, and cross-border founder gatherings, giving overseas brands a physical space to test products, meet customers, and integrate into local networks. This accelerator has already partnered with global brands and institutions, including museum organizations, consumer brands, and venture ecosystem partners.

Her recent work with Pigeon US reflects this philosophy clearly. Rather than relying on traditional advertising, she developed a community-driven launch model rooted in conversations with American parents, health educators, local creators, and immigrant families. The result: a culturally grounded, insight-driven entry strategy that helped the brand build trust in one of the world’s most competitive baby-care markets.

Across all her work from brand consulting to accelerator leadership, Peiying combines strategic precision with a distinctly human touch. In an era where global expansion increasingly depends on trust, nuance, and long-term relationships, Peiying’s work reflects a more sustainable model of how brands grow across cultures. She uses data, but never loses sight of emotion, cultural nuance, and the long-term relationships that can sustain a brand’s global expansion.