Opinion ID: 3160389
Heading Depth: 4
Heading Rank: 6

Heading: Degree of customer care

Text: The degree of customer care—i.e., how carefully a consumer selects a particular good or service—may also affect the possibility of consumer confusion. In most cases, customers are held to the standard of a “typical buyer exercising ordinary caution”; confusion is less likely in cases involving expensive or unusual services or unusually skilled buyers. Homeowners Grp., 3 Plaintiffs spell the name of “Tri-Serve, Ltd.” with a hyphen in the Complaint, but we do not believe that the lack of a hyphen rendered the use of the Tri-Serve name anything other than misleading to its existing customers. We have held that where “differences in lettering and hyphenating are very slight,” they are “likely to cause confusion.” Induct-O-Matic, 747 F.2d at 361. No. 15-3302 Grubbs, et al. v. Sheakley Group, et al. Page 13 931 F.2d at 1111. There is no evidence that business owners purchasing HR services from TriServe or Sheakley should be held to this higher standard. The question for our ultimate analysis, then, is whether a typical buyer exercising ordinary caution receiving Strunk-Zwick’s e-mail could be confused as whether the HR services were coming from Sheakley or Tri-Serve.