Brand Resilience and Technical Sovereignty: The Audi Case under Adversarial Management

This paper examines Audi AG as a paradigmatic case of brand resilience and technical sovereignty under conditions of adversarial management. Drawing on corporate history from 1899 to the present, we trace how Audi's organisational identity survived a cascade of existential threats: the boardroom expulsion of its founder, forced renaming, wartime industrial destruction, Soviet asset confiscation and, most significantly, a deliberate policy of brand annihilation by its acquirer, Volkswagen AG, in the 1960s. We argue that three recursive mechanisms — semiotic transmutation, clandestine intrapreneurship, and technical legacy capitalisation — account for the brand's survival and subsequent ascent to a market valuation of $83 billion. The Audi 100 episode, in which engineer Ludwig Kraus developed a flagship model entirely in secret against explicit board prohibition, is analysed as a canonical instance of subversive innovation preserving identity capital. Implications for brand strategy, governance theory, and the management of technically intensive firms are discussed.