How Professional Are You?

Back home and saw 3 letters from National Geographic. As expected, they are promoting subscription to the magazine. I love their photos but my experience of subscribing the magazine proved to be sort of 暴殄天物 since I usually could not finish reading. So I decided to skip this time and in hope of saving some trees.

Still, curious to know what offers they are making, I opened each of them to take a look. Given the same package (a year's membership and free gifts originally priced at $480), one of them offers the 'Preferred Professional Rate' at HK$345 (28% off), and the other two offer 'Preferred Professional Rate' at $224 (53% off). I'm interested to know how they do the segmentation of the 'Professionals'. Too bad that I couldn't decode the chain of numbers that tagged to my name, nor I have any idea to speculate on the very subtle differences in the ways my name and address are printed on the 3 letters so as to justify the 25% difference between the 'Preferred Professional Rate' offers.

Come to think of it - I am who I am. Disregard what 'profession' or 'membership' or certain purchase history or whatever preference that I (once) tag to, I should be the same ME in each of these circumstances. So, what is out there to justify 'discrimination' (price-wise, if not more) between the three but indeed the same ME?