As the world took a pause to mark the 25th anniversary since Elvis died, commentators managed to wipe away their tears for a cold, hard analysis of the Elvis brand.
Despite a good year for the King, which saw him with a number one hit, "A little less conversation", attendance at his home, Graceland, has been falling year-on-year.
His record company, amid claims that the popularity of the single had more to do with the remixing by JXL and its appearance on Nike's World Cup football ad than with a sudden resurgence of cool for Elvis, is working on ways of refreshing his image. Richard Sanders, general manager of RCA, told The Times: "The biggest challenge is to erase the memory of the caricature of Elvis, the one ingrained for so many years as a bloated icon."
Also in desperate need of a new image is the Conservative Party, according to the man who helped rebrand it during the 1980s.
Michael Peters, chairman of the Identica Partnership, has said: "If the Conservative Party were a brand or a big business, they would be firing the people at the top and getting new people in, because it is very evident that nobody actually knows now what the Conservative Party stands for."
A report by the right-wing think tank, the Centre for Policy Studies, slammed the Tories and its leader, Iain Duncan Smith, whose leadership style Peters has branded "anonymous".
Ann Summers might spend its time positioning itself as the home of naughty sex toys and thumbing its nose at royalty, but it revealed this week it was making a bid for legitimacy.
The chain has been prevented from advertising vacancies in JobCentres, because of a rule that says they are not allowed to carry vacancies associated with the sex or personal services industry.
Ann Summers' high profile chief executive Jacqueline Gold has slammed the rule as being "archaic", and has written to JobCentre Plus as a last attempt to head off the legal challenge. Ann Summers stores do not require licences like other sex shops.
Meanwhile, the Co-op chain of supermarkets was vowing to take the confusion out of healthy eating, but promising it would defy food labelling laws and tell consumers what they really wanted to know about the food they eat: how much fat, energy and salt it contains.
The first products to get the benefit of "consumer-friendly" labelling would be its own-brand beefburgers and jam roly-poly, and the Co-op said it hoped its initiative would speed up a European-wide initiative to change the presentation of nutritional information.
In a slightly more upmarket form of retailing, Harvey Nichols has opened its fourth store in the UK, in Edinburgh.
Located in St Andrew's Square, the new outlet is the second biggest after the Knightsbridge store, and took 3 years and £20m to complete. It has been described as the "biggest single retail investment in 30 years in Edinburgh", and the council hopes it will help to attract more investment to the city's east end.
Harvey Nichols' expansion plans have seen stores open in Leeds and Birmingham, with a fifth store set to open in Manchester next year.
While reports circulated this week that budget airline Ryanair is to be named as delivering the worst customer service, the Australian national carrier, Qantas, was struggling to become less Australian.
The airline, which is 21.4% owned by British Airways, has long been lobbying the Australian government to allow more foreign investment, so it can embark on a programme of refurbishing its fleet.
However the airline, which saw its finest moment when Dustin Hoffman's character in Rainman claimed it was the safest airline in the world, has been caught up in the country's concern over foreigners buying the Australian telecoms giant Telstra.
Finally, in Austria, which was in the news last week because of a resurgence in the popularity of lederhosen, advertisers were urging their countrymen to cheer up.
The campaign to get people to stop complaining probably hit at the wrong moment, as several areas of the country faced devastating floods. It has been backed by the Austrian advertising industry and the Chamber of Commerce, and will tell Austrians that their constant complaining about issues such as the unemployment rate is helping to drive business into the ground.
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