Loyalty programs and financial crisis

Everybody these days heard about worldwide financial crisis and its impact on the real economics. What it brings to marketing and customer loyalty reward programs?
Any financial turbulence naturally hit luxury market segment first. Buying things which are not necessary for your daily life can be postponed to a better time. But people have started to cut spending on things which were common to buy during stable years. Car sales, for example have declined by 20% comparing to the previous year. So, step by step, people reduce consumption, companies reduce spending and cut investments. There is a fear that organizations will cut most marketing efforts in particular deployments of customer loyalty programs.
Indeed, if crisis is here for a long time – many companies will fight for the survival and skip optimization of working with customers to retain the best of them. On other side some companies may decide to completely cut budgets on required modernization, automation, etc. People responsible for the budget planning can think following: we lived without this for 100 years; we will live without this next 100 years, nothing bad happened. If time to tighten the belts will come soon – such viewpoint has the right to existence but if the situation is not so bad we think it is better not to cut such important efforts. Reasonable investments are important for keeping the business running even in tough times.
Source: http://www.pointloyalty.com/blog/2009/01/16/loyalty-programs-and-financial-crisis/