Hong Kong – Global communications consulting firm Ruder Finn Asia has officially rolled out SONAR 5.5, the latest version of its SONAR crisis management simulation platform.
SONAR 5.5 enables corporations to enhance their crisis preparedness by addressing evolving risks to share price, revenue, and reputation. This multilingual platform also supports several languages, including English, Chinese, Korean, and Japanese, ensuring comprehensive global applicability.
Additionally, the platform incorporates new interactive features that identify potential areas for future concern, allowing for pre-emptive strategy and planning.
Ruder Finn Asia has pinpointed the critical consequences of being unprepared for a crisis: disorganised responses, scattered decision-making, lack of strategy, and absence of mission. These shortcomings lead to a loss of narrative, control, and value. Conversely, Ruder Finn Asia’s experience shows that companies that navigate crises successfully exhibit key traits: preparation, leadership, decisive action, and effective communication.
When confronted with a full-scale issue or crisis, SONAR 5.5 is designed to offer a fast, effective, and action-oriented solution. It can identify planning gaps and propose practical, real-world solutions.
With nearly 100% client satisfaction, SONAR 5.5 creates an immersive crisis environment, enabling participants to experience every facet of a rapidly evolving crisis. This versatile, internet-enabled multimedia platform supports simulations for single markets or global teams of up to 100 people, allowing corporations to assess the effectiveness of their crisis plans and identify any gaps.
Furthermore, SONAR 5.5 can meticulously replicate every aspect of a crisis situation, from negative media reports and share price impacts to stakeholder anger and employee protests. The platform’s immersive design makes participants quickly forget they are in a simulation, thanks to the realistic environment it creates. Each SONAR session results in a more experienced team, enhanced risk planning, increased vigilance, and improved future preparedness.
Charles Lankester, EVP for global risk at Ruder Finn Asia, said, “Together, we build resilience and ensure our clients act with confidence, whatever the circumstances. We have delivered close to 150 SONARs since 2020 and consistently hear how much clients value the experience and learning. The SONAR team is a career expert in reputation and risk management, ensuring our clients stay ahead of situations wherever possible. Reputation is a primary global business risk, but most companies are unprepared and under-resourced in the event of an issue. We are the risk management partner of choice for hundreds of corporations and bring experience across Hong Kong, Mainland China, Asia-Pacific, and globally.”
Also talking about the launch, David Ko, managing director at Ruder Finn Interactive (RFI), explained, “SONAR 5.5 is the result of years of crisis management expertise and learning, distilled into an actionable, high-value platform, updated for the AI era. The crisis landscape now evolves at an ever-faster pace, so we continually upgrade SONAR to reflect this new environment. New threats such as deepfakes, voice cloning, and bots now require crisis management with technology that meets the challenge.”
“Previously, we embedded generative AI into SONAR’s operation, harnessing the power of ChatGPT to create multimedia injects that simulate interactions with key stakeholders such as government regulators, activist shareholders, protesting employees, and consumer groups. SONAR 5.5 now streamlines and presents additional interactions visually so that participants can easily track and manage their crisis decisions and actions. The core of SONAR’s value, however, remains the expert guidance and coaching conducted by trainers and their real-time feedback on client team dynamics and effectiveness. This work also incorporates a significant predictive component, identifying potential areas for future concern and preemptive strategy and planning,” he added.