Martin Sander takes over sales and marketing at Audi on 1 October
Martin Sander joins the Audi board of management on 1 October with sales and marketing. He worked at Audi from 1995 to 2022 before moving to the Volkswagen brand board.
Photo: Alex Urezkov / Pexels
Martin Sander takes over sales and marketing at Audi on 1 October 2026. The carmaker announced it on 3 September. Sander joins the board of management in the seat that Marco Schubert is leaving.
Sander worked at Audi from 1995 to 2022
Sander is not a newcomer. He held several senior jobs at Audi over 27 years, in Europe and in North America. He left in 2022 and later joined the board of the Volkswagen brand, where he ran sales, marketing and after sales. Now he moves back one floor up in the same group.
Marco Schubert moves to Volkswagen Group North America
Schubert is not leaving the company. He takes charge of the group’s business in North America, a market where German carmakers are under pressure from tariffs and from local electric brands. The swap is part of a wider reshuffle of sales teams inside the Volkswagen Group.
Audi changes its sales chief while Seat winds down
The timing matters. The group is already reshaping its brand line-up, and plans to end the Seat brand by 2029 and hand its role to Cupra. Every one of those moves needs a sales and marketing chief who can explain to buyers what each badge is for. That is the job Sander is walking into.
What Döllner and Döss said about the appointment
Audi chief executive Gernot Döllner said Sander is “the right appointment for this role”, pointing to his international experience and his network inside the group. Manfred Döss, who chairs the supervisory board, called him an experienced sales and marketing expert who knows Audi well. Both quotes come from Audi’s own release, so treat them as the company’s view rather than an outside verdict.
Kohl’s and Audi both put one person over marketing and sales
For marketers the pattern is worth watching. Sales and marketing sit in one pair of hands at Audi, as they did at the Volkswagen brand. Retailers are doing something similar: Kohl’s recently put marketing and digital under one chief customer officer. The logic is the same in both cases. When the same person owns the message and the sales number, the brand plan and the discount plan stop fighting each other. The risk is also the same. Brand work is slower to show results than a price cut, so it tends to lose when one person has to choose.