My apologies for butting-in without having read the entire thread.
I have a simple observation, and I'm curious about the OP's opinions of it...
If you give a special deal to a subset of your customers (say EEVBlog readers), then you are giving an unnecessarily poor deal to all other customers. The exceptions would be if you are losing money on the special deal, or if the costs of dealing with the subset were lower than dealing with the other customers.
The usual manifestation I see of this, typically with large companies, is that their special deal prices are no better than ordinary retailers' prices (and can be worse).
As I said, opinions welcome.