Health and fitness product naming

In keeping with healthcare giant Aetna’s commitment to improving its members’ health while reducing healthcare costs, the company partnered with Apple to provide its members an innovative healthcare service: a highly personalized smart watch–based app that helps them achieve and maintain wellness through daily prompts.

The service combines a member’s health history with their Apple Watch activity to provide custom goals, achievable actions, and big incentivizing rewards—like gift cards from popular retailers. What truly distinguishes this service is the use of members’ actual healthcare data. The app helps coordinate every aspect of health, from activity, nutrition, and sleep tracking to managing medical appointments, healthcare costs, and more.

We developed more than 1,600 names for the app, and, after screening and further review, Attain crossed the finish line.

Attain instantly expresses the empowerment and satisfaction of achieving health goals through daily activity. Its bold and slightly techy tone expresses the confidence this technology instills, while its brevity and simplicity suggest that working toward better health can be a straightforward process, available to anyone. The name’s alliteration with Aetna (and Apple) helps make it more memorable and fun to say as well as offering a graphical symmetry between the company and product. And as a common English word, the name, and the service’s benefit, can be easily understood by customers with limited English.

Attain by Aetna was announced in early 2019, with about 300,000 downloads during the initial rollout. It received significant media attention, with coverage in national mainstream press as well as health and tech media. The Aetna program is still going strong, with members continuing to earn a free Apple Watch by progressing toward their wellness goals.

Award Winner
Transform Awards, Highly Commended, Best Naming Strategy