High-quality development, as a crucial goal of China’s economy, requires enterprises to focus on growth quality, which is built upon deep insights into and understanding of the market. Marketing capability, as a key mechanism that translates market information into economic benefits, is closely related to enterprise growth quality. However, existing literature remains insufficient in analyzing the specific dimensions of Chinese enterprises’ marketing capabilities and their impact on growth quality. Based on a sample of 181 Chinese enterprises across various industries, this paper employs an interview survey and utilizes LDA topic modeling embedded with machine learning combined with a grounded theory analysis framework. It extracts 12 specific marketing practice activities, summarizes 4 core marketing capabilities, and identifies 13 relational structures among them. The findings reveal that among the four marketing capabilities, market strategy planning and brand management directly drive the cultivation of long-term competitiveness and brand equity accumulation, while relationship management and digital marketing innovation indirectly enhance growth quality through rapid response and technological empowerment. Furthermore, through comparative analysis with Western enterprises, this paper identifies the unique characteristics of Chinese enterprises’ marketing capabilities and uses quantitative analysis to reveal performance differences in key marketing capabilities among enterprises with different characteristics. The study systematically deconstructs the constituent dimensions of marketing capabilities, clarifies the internal mechanisms by which these capabilities promote enterprise growth quality, and addresses the limitations of existing research that is primarily based on Western samples.