A client handed me a slide last fall with a bullet on it that read: we own the customer relationship. It sat on a page about their retail app, between a screenshot and a font decision. I asked what that ownership would look like if the app store pulled the app on a Tuesday. The room laughed, politely, and we went back to the color palette.
I have thought about that laugh every day since May 16.
That is the day the Commerce Department added Huawei to the entity list, and by the following Monday the reporting confirmed the part that matters to anyone who builds brands. Google suspended Huawei's Android license. Future phones ship without Gmail, without Maps, without YouTube, without the Play Store. The factories still run. The supply chain still moves. The product, as a customer understands the product, is gone.
Huawei ships more handsets than Apple does. It is the second largest phone brand on the planet. And a licensing decision made in Mountain View, in response to a decision made in Washington, took a piece out of it in seventy two hours.
A brand does not own what it can only borrow, and most brands are borrowing far more than they have ever written down.
I have watched this from inside brand strategy rooms. We audit the logo. We audit the tone. We audit competitors nobody in the category is actually worried about. We almost never audit dependency, which is the only audit that tells you what happens on your worst day.
So run it. One, list every experience a customer would name as your product, then mark the ones you do not control: the payment rail, the app store, the shipping partner, the recommendation feed, the search result. Two, ask what the customer loses if each one goes dark, in their words, not in yours. Three, decide which of those you are willing to keep renting, on purpose, with your eyes open.
Zynga was a spectacular business until Facebook changed what it wanted from games. Newsrooms rebuilt themselves around Facebook video and then learned what somebody else's pivot costs. Netflix has spent years and a fortune on originals precisely because it learned this with a catalog it did not own, and Disney has now made clear how that story ends.
Renting is not the sin. Pretending you own it is.
We almost never audit dependency, which is the only audit that tells you what happens on your worst day.
Truffles spent Monday asleep on the arm of the couch, indifferent to entity lists and Android licenses, which is the correct posture for a cat and the wrong one for a brand. Barnaby at least understands that his supply chain runs through me, which is more dependency awareness than I have found in most decks this year.