Recession and Consumer Behavior

One of my friends went for a job interview and the topic for group discussion was "Effects of recession on Consumer Behavior". My friend is in Finance stream, and so he couldn't speak much on it, but this led me into deep thinking.

Recession has badly hit the world and almost all businesses are striving to atleast survive. How do marketers measure Consumer Behavior (CB) in a recession-hit scenario?

The process of Consumption Behavior is a congregation of four consecutive psychological domains, all backed by a common domain of Personality. These four psychological factors are Motivation, Perception, Learning and Attitude. 

The essence of CB is that consumers of a segment depict more or less uniform behavior and that is what is capitaised on by marketers. Now, as there is recession, the behavior of consumers have changed drastically. For eg: A consumer may have a favorable attitude towards say, Gucci watch, but his attitude towards purchase behavior may be unfavorable. He may like Gucci as a brand, but may not have resources to buy it. As such, marketers can't conclude anything about consumer attitude, if they aren't buying a particular product.

So, how to tackle this situation? Well, in current situation, not only economies, but consumers too are in deep liquidity crunch. As such, consumer attitude is dictated by pricing. Consumers want value for money. So, marketers must give them cost-effective or efficiency pricing, and that's how marketers can mould the attitude of consumers towards their offerings.

Let's just wait and watch the actions of marketers and then draw a conclusion in this context.