Nike has tapped one of Guangdong’s most enduring metaphors – the art of slow-cooked soup – for its latest China campaign, rolling out a short film and city activations under the theme ‘落足料，点会冇料到’ (Approx. If you put in real ingredients, of course the result will be good). It’s a refreshingly local take on effort and achievement, stitched together through the lens of Cantonese kitchen logic: good soup takes good ingredients, and performance takes work.
The film centres on Guangdong sprinter Su Bingtian, whose career has long been framed around quiet accumulation and improbable breakthroughs. Instead of competition footage, Nike drops him into a Guangzhou wet market, selecting symbolic ingredients that map neatly onto his journey: the chicken leg that reflects his decision to switch starting foot, the bitter melon standing in for injury, the aromatics that nod to discipline and repetition. Each one is an ‘ingredient’ in Su’s bowl and, by extension, his career.
Supporting the film is a set of Full-Flavour Formula posters fronted by six Guangdong athletes, from fencer Pan Jiajie (潘家杰) to hurdler Pan Ruiyan (潘睿彦). Each offers their own recipe for progress – discipline, breakthrough, accumulation, consistency – turning the campaign into a catalogue of what putting in the work looks like across sports.
This Nike Cantonese campaign didn’t stop at metaphor. The brand set up a Cantonese soup pop-up in Guangzhou, serving herbal bowls to runners who completed a set mileage and showed proof at the venue. The activation, complete with a Swoosh-shaped soup spoon, folds the creative neatly back into the running community and echoes the timing of the 15th National Games, hosted across Guangdong, Hong Kong and Macau.
Nike have a good track record of campaigns in China. The Nike Cantonese campaign lands because it trades spectacle for familiarity. It’s a campaign built not on heroics but on the everyday logic of putting something in to get something out – a distinctly Guangdong reading of Just Do It, and a reminder that cultural fluency often hits harder than a voice with global mass appeal.
