Why are parent brands cool with only having one branding domain?

[SanfordWhiteman]

To our chagrin, we have confirmed that even with workspaces activated, we get only one branding domain for all pURLs in all e-mails.  This seems to fly in the face of the claim that workspaces and lead partitions can be used to manage several brands.  

If we were Gap, for example, we'd need a separate instance just to get links to click.oldnavy.com. I have no choice but to accept this technical reality, but at the same time I'm kind of dumbfounded about the inability to manage sister brands/bridge lines/etc. in the same place and yet segregrate them at send time.  

Of course it helps the service's bottom line to get 1MM leads in each of 3 different instances.  But, suspending my cynicism for the moment, somehow I don't think that's the underlying reason it isn't possible.  But can some users explain how they changed or formed their marketing philosophy so that it was okay that only the parent brand appears in e-mails?

[SanfordWhiteman]

Thanks for thinking about it. Yes, this limitation is confirmed (in fact, voluntarily conveyed) by Marketo's professional services team. Landing pages are relatively flexible but not branding domains.  You just get one.

I'm glad you agree that exposing the parent brand is not good for your image -- in our case there could even be legal complications if we linked to the parent's domain.  Actually we use one of the sub-brands now.  This is okay for some of its related brands (kind of like Foot Locker and Lady Foot Locker, no big deal) but for other ones the marketing department is very clear that it's unacceptable.  As a result we are now spinning up a new instance, with no shared leads or anything.  It's a real pain.

When Marketo creates pURLs it is able to track a click not only to the lead but to the originating e-mail send activity. As far as I know there is no way to replay or simulate what an e-mail specific pURL would be, as it only gets created at send time.  If you don't have Marketo create a pURL I don't see how you could retrieve what it would have been and then redirect to it. Not to mention that populating custom pURL fields for every lead -- adding a new such pURL for every lead and unique e-mail -- might be technically feasible but it doesn't matter because the marketing team will never adapt their workflow for this.  If you have more suggestions I'm all ears. 

[Josh_Hill13]

I did not know there were any limits to PURLs in particular. You can have different page sub domains for each Workspace using the Alias Rules in admin.

If the URL is visible to the user, this might not be so good if the parent brand is not well known, or a holding company. I assume you spoke to marketo about this? You could post it as an Idea. You could also try using a redirect set such that

Your External PURL > Marketo PURL 

which will require you to output a list and then setup redirects somewhere else, then use that new PURL in a token to place in the email. A better way would be to generate the purls externally and then import them into a field for use as a token.