This seems silly... but by simply running a good business, companies can increase their search engine rankings without doing any SEO work! (Gasp.) For a good example of them, check out the Red 4k digital cinema camera (red.com). For me, they show up #1 for the SERP "red". They are beating out Bono's (Red) campagin (joinred.com). In the case of Red, they don't really need to rank for anything because their users know about them. And they aren't ranking for the keywords that they might want. But to rank well for a competitive keyword without any SEO work, IMO, shows that SEO can be as simple as running a good business. If you search around, there are many sites that rank well without having any SEO work done at all. Something to think about.
And you think the domain name "red" was not selected for SEO reasons? How good would your concept be if the term was "Green"? Your business would be out of business.
The best kind of link building is always going to be the type that you don't do yourself. If you have a useful site, a good service or product, people will link to you without asking, that's how it's supposed to work!
The domain name Red.com (or naming the company red) would be terrible for SEO reasons. If not many people linked to you, then your customers would have a hard time finding you if they typed in your company name. If your company name is some made up word, then it's extremely easy to rank for it. But with Red, it's very hard. 2- Their target audience doesn't search the word red when looking for a digital cinema camera (or video/film camera). red4k.com or something to that effect would be a better hoice.
I'm not sure how you can claim that red.com got their rankings without doing any seo. I doubt they had no part in getting their thousands of backlinks. They probably did get a lot of backlinks based on the quality of their product though. Really any big company should be able to rank in the top 3 for their actual company name. That also holds true for companies with lousy products and lousy service.