Last week, Frasers Group opened a 90,000 square foot Sports Direct store in Liverpool’s Church Street. The new flagship outlet, which is spread across a three-story complex, will bring the sportswear chain and Everlast Gyms under one roof.


Data from YouGov BrandIndex UK – which asks customers a range of questions about retail brands every day – shows that Liverpool may have been a solid choice for the new store. Sports Direct’s brand perceptions in the North West are better than they are in the rest of the UK.

Index scores – a measure of overall brand health calculated by taking the average of several metrics – show that, among consumers in the North West, the chain scores 7.2. By comparison, for consumers based in the rest of the UK, scores are three points lower at 4.2.

Underlying metrics tell a similar story. Sports Direct’s Impression score, which measure a brand’s positive and negative sentiment, sits at 3.8 for the region – four points ahead of the rest of the country.

The brand’s Quality score is close to neutral for the North West (-0.2), but slip decisively into negative across the rest of the country as a whole (-3.4), while its Recommend score – a measure of customer advocacy – sits at 10.6 for the region and 7.2 everywhere else.

Things are closer when it comes to its Value for Money score – where the difference sits at 1.2 (16.7 in the North West vs. 15.5 for the rest of the county).

Perhaps most importantly, Sports Direct ‘s Current Customer score – which measures whether consumers have bought from a brand in the past three months – are 13.5 for the region, and 10.9 for the UK excluding the North West. This suggests that Frasers Group have, to some extent, gone where its audience is.

With customers queueing outside the store before its official opening, there’s certainly some appetite for the Liverpool site’s offerings – will it provide a launchpad for further expansion in future?

This article originally appeared in City A.M.