This past week’s Consumer Electronics Show in Vegas produced two big stories with one major theme: recession. The first, not surprisingly, is that consumer technology manufacturers have responded to falling discretionary income. After years of excess the pitch from manufacturers is now  “value,” not glitz or pizazz. My colleague James McQuivey reported from the show that several exhibitors spent more time emphasizing the value in their old products than launching new ones.

The second story was the falling attendance. Early estimates put attendance down by 8% year over year, and if the taxi lines were any indication the actual attendance was much lighter than that. (UPDATE: VentureBeat reports the drop at 22% — yikes!) Frankly this is not a big shock. When budgets are tight — both for individuals and businesses — expenses like travel and trade shows hit the cutting room floor.

For marketers this is a big problem. The last few months I’ve been doing a lot of research with my colleague Laura Ramos on the types of media information sources that have the biggest impact on business buyers. What we have found again and again is that trade shows have a big impact, especially amongst the biggest buyers. Among IT hardware buyers, for example, 65% of buyers report trade shows are important or very important to their purchases, the 6th most influential information source overall. (see the very complex graphic below)

For the balance of the recession — and economists are split on how long that may be — attendance, and consequentially client impact, for trade shows is going to be down. Marketers, this is going to hurt. One of your better tools for informing buyers will be neutered. As your marketing budgets get slashed the pressure to go cold turkey on trade shows and events is going to be high, and many marketers will cut. This would be a mistake. Fewer of your competitors will pay to shake hands and demo products to customers so while your attendance may be down, the competitive impact will be up. If your budget is really tight, think about opening up your local offices for an open house; the customers may not be able to pay to travel to you, but you should be able to get to them at a low cost.

Many marketers will look to cut budgets in the next few weeks and while the pressure to cut trade shows and events will be high, keeping the intimacy with customers will pay dividends, even during a recession.

UPDATE: Just this morning I got an email from Oracle advertising “HP Oracle Exadata Roadshow Boston‏.” Their database is wrong for my location, but the strategy is dead on. If customers can’t pay to get to you for trade shows you must go to them.

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