In his book Bursts: The Hidden Pattern Behind Everything We Do, Albert-László Barabási makes the point that just about everything follows a power law distribution. And when you know that, you can describe the movements of, e.g., animals, science, dollar bills, and viruses:
In 1996 Sergey and his collaborators reported that albatrosses follow a Lévy trajectory. The finding inspired an avalanche of research concluding that a wide range of animal species, from monkeys to bumblebees, all move following Lévy patterns. ...
Science itself often follows a Lévy pattern -- a huge jump ahead is trailed by many small, localized steps that appear to take us nowhere, or perhaps even backward in some instances. These are not wasted moves, however, but necessary to testing the boundaries of the new paradigm.
In 2006, Brockmann found that dollar bills follow a Lévy trajectory, suggesting that when it comes to our daily wanderings we are not so different from albatrosses or monkeys. ... The widely different jumps of the dollar bills capture an extreme population heterogeneity that affects everything, from the spread of the viruses to resource management in cities.
He goes on to say that people's movements do not follow this path exactly because rather than drifting over long distances, we always return home.
This pattern, of course, can relate to many more things. Seth Godin, for example, relates it to consumer behavior:
Someone finds your restaurant. They love it. They return with friends. They hang out and become regulars for a while. Then they get bored and start browsing again.
Adding the Lévy flight to your understanding is a much more nuanced representation of consumer behavior than solely thinking about the ideas of brand loyalty or random web surfing.
Not everything follows this trajectory. Wikipedia notes, for example, that sharks and other ocean predators follow Brownian motion by default and only abandon it in favor of Lévy flight if they cannot find food. It would probably even be too simplistic to say that nearly everything follows this trajectory, but if you have no idea, it's probably a good first guess.
