Advertising restrictions and sustainability transitions: does banning advertising of harmful products induce innovation in benign alternatives?

• Bans on advertising are increasingly promoted by environmental activists. • First study on the impact of advertising bans on product innovation. • We use a case study of the Norwegian low/no-alcohol beer market. • Advert bans can incentivise innovation in socially desirable alternative products. • Advert bans can both destabilise regimes and foster niches if designed well. Environmental activists increasingly seek to ban advertising of polluting products. Advertising bans (of tobacco and alcohol for example) have been widely used in support of public health objectives, but such bans have received little attention from environmental policy or sustainability transition scholars. Sustainability transition studies have noted that advertising contributes to the durability of socio-technical regimes, which suggests advert bans can be seen as attempts at regime destabilisation. In this paper, we focus attention on the potential for advertising bans to influence product innovation incentives, and thus establish niches for sustainable innovations. We use a case study of the Norwegian beer market, using low/zero-alcohol beer as an analogy for sustainable innovation. We show that restricting advertising of a harmful product can stimulate innovation in a benign alternative. We conclude that carefully designed advertising bans could be a useful part of the policy toolbox for stimulating sustainable innovation.