What South African Zulu users taught us about digital personas and why tone matters more than you think
Understanding how users connect with digital personas isn't just about the words on the screen; it's about the values and cultural context behind them.
Bold Insight led this research project for ​Google​ (​YouTube​),​ ​our fellow ​UXalliance partner​, with ​Mantaray Africa​ serving as the local research partner in South Africa. The project's goal was to explore how users in culturally diverse markets interpret digital personas and how these personas need to be adapted to resonate more meaningfully within African contexts rather than defaulting to Western norms.
The findings from this study also contributed to the EPIC paper, Decolonising LLMs: An Ethnographic Framework for AI in African Contexts. This paper highlights how culture, language, and tone influence trust in AI-driven content. Our persona research validated many of its conclusions, particularly the need for digital systems, including large language models, to reflect local values, linguistic diversity, and cultural authenticity.
Designed with emerging language model applications in mind, this research explored how everyday users engage with personas built for scale, revealing what it takes to make those personas genuinely resonate in linguistically and culturally rich contexts, such as South Africa. Together with Bold Insight, we set out to delve deeply into how real people react to carefully crafted digital personas and to uncover why some resonate more than others.
At Mantaray Africa, we've long seen how cultural nuance, tone of voice, and representation shape the way consumers interact with content. This initiative served as yet another reminder: there's no such thing as a "universal persona."
The brief: Personas under the microscope
We aimed to evaluate how participants responded to a series of distinct personas, each with their own tone, style, and underlying assumptions. Our objective was to determine what worked, what didn't, and in which direction a global-facing composite persona should be taken.
Key questions included:
Which persona or combination of traits resonated most with participants?
What aspects of the writing style did participants find positive or negative?
What pitfalls should be avoided when crafting a unified persona?
If participants had to choose one style, which persona would they prefer, and why?
Our approach: Deep listening in context
We conducted 10 in-depth interviews with South African participants, each session lasting around 90 minutes, moderated entirely in Zulu. Conducting these sessions in the participants' native language created a natural and emotionally resonant environment where participants could express themselves openly, without the limitations of translation.
The interviews were designed around stimuli that allowed participants to experience and reflect on each persona in real time. At Mantaray, we know that true insight emerges when participants can share not just what they think, but why they feel a certain way. These sessions revealed deeper emotional responses to tone, inclusion, and relatability.
We paid particular attention to moments where participants used cultural analogies, humour, and storytelling, which indicated strong emotional engagement. From these conversations, we delivered a topline report summarising patterns and providing strategic recommendations.

Key insights: What we heard

The EPIC paper highlighted some of the key findings from our research No one size fits all. Preferences varied: some participants appreciated concise, confident tones, while others preferred nurturing or exploratory personas. This underlines the need for flexible frameworks rather than a single fixed persona. Context matters. Users referenced local expressions, values, and generational differences when explaining their preferences. This reinforced the EPIC paper's argument that AI and digital systems must be grounded in local cultural realities to build trust and usability. Relatability is king. Participants gravitated toward personas that felt authentic, conversational, and free of jargon. Overly polished or "robotic" tones created a sense of distance. Tone shaped trust. Warm, inclusive, and human writing styles were rated highest. Participants disengaged when the tone was overly formal or prescriptive, even when the information itself was valuable.

What's next: Designing with empathy, not assumptions
This project underscored the importance of early-stage persona validation, especially for global products. It's easy to assume a tone will work everywhere, but our research, like the insights shared in the EPIC framework, proves that to enable trust, you need to ensure cultural alignment through local testing and insights.
Going forward, we are:
Refining and shaping a composite persona that balances global consistency with local nuance.
Creating tone and content guidelines for content creators.
Ensuring continuous user validation is integrated into persona development, especially in local languages.

Final thoughts

Personas are often the voice of a brand. In markets as culturally diverse as South Africa, that voice must feel authentic, respectful, and familiar. If you're designing digital content or AI-driven products for emerging markets, don't guess. Test it. Listen first, decide second. Want to learn more about how Mantaray Africa helps global teams decode cultural nuance through UX research? Let's connect.